Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-12-12/In focus

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Interesting. Thanks for mentioning our presentation. The Prezi can be seen in our Wikimania presentation: File:Wikimania 2024 - Dilijan - Day 1 - Exploring Americanization in different regions of the world using Wikipedia and Wikidata.webm. You may also want to check our paper on this, that the presentation was based on, published earlier this year: Americanization: Coverage of American Topics in Different Wikipedias. Accessible through WP:Wikipedia Library, I hope (not in LibGen yet, sorry...). No OA as WMF does not support grants for OA on Wikipedia studies (we asked), and no other funding source was available. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 00:44, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Now, comments on your analysis. 1) I'd nitpick not adding Australia and New Zealand to the Western world, but let's face it - their numbers are not likely to be very game changing. (Sorry, Aussies... I don't even know what is the nickname for New Zealanders...) 2) I understand very well why you have no Asian group (it's a pain to make); I'd still suggest having at least Japanese for some decent-ish comparison. Also I'd add German, as well as Russia to the set, those are big wikis (see also below). 3) Riding on - let's remember that Spanish and Portuguese significantly represent Latin America (you mention this for Spanish, but you seem to have forgotten Brazil...we have data from few years ago on views and edits to wiki by country - see [1] and [2]; sadly they are a few years old, the new Wikipedia Stats pages suck and if that information is still somewhere, I was never able to find it...), and English also includes many readers and contributors from India. Again, if anyone is interested in more, see our paper, we have like two page limitation chapter discussing this stuff. Anyway, the point is that the numbers above are not pure 'Western' world and to some degree (hard to estimate quickly) include Latin America and India. French is probably the 'purest', although it is popular in some African countries. That's why German would be very good here (big Western wiki not used much outside Europe). Russia would be good, since they not really 'West' (nor 'Asia'; Russia is, well, Russia). 4) As for the numbers, it's fascinating to see how different Arab numbers are, I'd love to learn more about what kind of people are and aren't discussed on Arab wiki, compared to 'Western'. 5) What's wrong with the table data for Arab and Culture? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:08, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, Kiwis. Jim.henderson (talk) 02:17, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, right, I forgot... :P _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:24, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I guess it's a basic understanding in eastern world editors that their is a supremecy of the so called west in term of equal distribution of content.––kemel49^{(connect)(contri)} 00:48, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

While bringing a spotlight to a specific region with a new article is pretty doable (love seeing articles dedicated to specific fields in specific countries), trying to bring up a non-canonical region in a broad-topic article tends to be controversial. Here's one experience I've had with this, for example, trying to add a little section on Latin America in the History of video games. (Same with Africa but I'm not sure when that was removed) ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 08:23, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The linked articles es:Culture and pt:Culture are for the Migos album, not for the concept of Culture. Atavoidirc (talk) 16:22, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Maplestrip Did you try starting a talk discussion to judge consensus? Or just start a dedicated stand-alone articles on these topics first, I am sure they are notable enough for that. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:46, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I actually just started a talk-page discussion, inspired by this In-Focus! I also wrote a few dedicated articles on those subjects, which is cool, but nobody looks at Video games in Nigeria if they aren't already interested in Nigeria. ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 09:10, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Or gaming trivia - or broader concepts. I mean, this won't be a top viewed article, but hey, I am planning on improving/writing some articles about related topics, namely science fiction (I have some materials on science fiction in some less known countries and wider regions). Science fiction in Africa is likely a notable concept and not just a fork of Afrofuturism. ([3]/[4] for example). Wishing you luck with your creations - I find this stuff very interesting, myself :) _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:50, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oh that's fascinating and exciting! I've been really happy to see topics related to Polish speculative fiction on the front-page recently (sad I couldn't find a translation of CyberJoly Drim), so I am really excited to see what else you might write like this ^_^ ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 18:14, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Maplestrip Machine translation is passable these days - you can translate CJD (published here) to English or such with just two mouse clicks. Granted, it is literature so the result want be as pretty as it would be from a professional literature translator (that's still is a few years away).

Many of my sf articles are published these days on pl wiki, but I am trying to get the better ones translated here. But again, I expect in few years we will have AI translating stuff... if you are curious, check for example my newest article on pl wiki at pl:Ostatnia godzina (powieść) and again, two clicks in browser should give you a passable English output. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:30, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I do use machine translation, especially for sources and such, but it just feels terrible to try to parse a story that way. You lose all of the original writing and get something much flatter in return. Did read a bit of Cyberjoly Drim and it was cool, but I didn't get as much out of it. And to tie it back to this article's topic, that is of course one of the many challenges of making our articles represent the full human range :p ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 10:32, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Is it realistic to expect a population of researchers to not have this sort of inherent linguistic bias? It is worthy of being done, but of course people who read, write, and speak English will go to English language sources first and that means subjects and topics that have happened within the Anglosphere get covered more. I see this all the time in plants. The sources are plentiful and easily accessed if a plant grows in North America. If it grows in Europe it is somewhat harder if it is not one of the cosmopolitan plants that have moved around the world. If the plant only grows somewhere like Mali or the Congo... it may well be impossible because the efforts to put sources for these countries online have not yet happened. And if they are online they may very well be in a language I do not read, I only know two. Anecdote: The other month when I wanted to de-stub an article for a Peruvian plant I had to physically go to a library to borrow a paper book. That slows things down. I could have done three much more in depth articles about American plants in the time it took me to write a short one for Castilleja ecuadorensis. And if I wanted a picture I would have to go to Peru and travel well into the Andes. So, of course, I'm going to work on plants closer to home more often. And given the huge gaps in the articles closer to home I'll never make even the local flora complete even if I keep editing steadily for another 20 years. I expect the reverse to also be true. Usually when I'm working on a North American species there is not an article in any language other than the four Wikis with a large number of bot created stubs (Cebuano, Svenska, Tiếng Việt, & Winaray). If the article does exist it is usually because of one editor. The one person with the skills, the time, and the interest has to exist to do the work. Because outside a few of the most famous or contentious topics it is going to be one editor who does most of the work to make an article really complete. TLDR: Editors are people. They're not perfectly spherical editing machines that have a universal set of skills to impartially and perfectly cover the world. 🌿MtBotany (talk) 04:47, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]