There are definitely areas of the world which have slow access to the
internet, some organisations compensate for this by having local caching
services. But the bottlenecks are based on the network structure and its
mismatch to demand levels, so are not purely a function of distance. A year
or two back there was a major upgrade to East Africa, and I've hear
complaints that various countries have slow access. Presumably its possible
that this could affect some parts of the US. Some of the reasons are
covered in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_congestion
It would be an interesting bit of research to try and see if the areas of
the world with low Wikipedia editing levels correlated well with areas of
low speed access to the Internet. If the data is available it might be
possible to deduce it by looking at things such as average times between
last hitting preview and hitting save by editors in particular geographies.
WSC
On 8 September 2012 00:57, Kerry Raymond kerry.raym...@gmail.com wrote:
** ** **
Similarly Internet penetration is very high here in **Australia**(available
to every home no matter how remote) and most home access is
broadband (I think we came in 2nd after South Korea in some
recent survey). There is also free access via public libraries, schools,
etc (government policy is that everyone should have access). My impression
is that most Australian WP editors do it from home.
** **
I am not particularly convinced that being in North America has some great
advantage wrt to the servers in Florida. I might be half a world
away but I don’t find that makes any difference to editing WP compared with
using some web service closer to home – we have massive great undersea
cables to carry the data across the Pacific Ocean. I guess some countries
might experience slower speeds if they don’t have adequate network
infrastructure in place but I don’t think it can be automatically assumed
that geographic distance is a barrier.
** **
Kerry
** **
--
*From:* wiki-research-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:
wiki-research-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] *On Behalf Of *
WereSpielChequers
*Sent:* Saturday, 8 September 2012 12:47 AM
*To:* Research into Wikimedia content and communities
*Subject:* Re: [Wiki-research-l] [pre-print] Value production in
acollaborativeenvironment
** **
Hi Taha,
I think you might want to review your assumptions about Internet access.
My understanding was that the **US** ranked behind **Canada** and
Northwest Europe, though ahead of **Europe** as a whole.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:InternetPenetrationWorldMap.svg
However that is a somewhat simplistic take on things. The **US** benefits
from faster connection speeds to the servers in Florida, so
active editors there can get more done in an hour.
But the **US** has more of a pro business set of employment laws than **
Europe**, especially mainland NW Europe. This makes it easier for US
companies to run surveillance on their employees internet use. So if there
are still any editors editing from work they are more likely to be in **
Europe**.
The vast majority of our editing is probably being done in people's own
time on domestic use IT equipment, so the base you really need to look for
is domestic broadband penetration. But on top of that a more urban culture
with more access to libraries and free PCs within them is probably also
helping the UK.
There's probably also a big cultural thing here. Even if people don't try
to edit articles about global warming or especially evolution there has got
to be some effect on their participation in Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an
encyclopaedia based we hope on reliable sources, so those people who have a
problem with science and academia are bound to find Wikipedia a less
congenial environment. There is bound to be some link between that and our
different editing rates on the two sides of the pond.
WSC
On 7 September 2012 14:09, Taha Yasseri taha.yas...@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
Thank you very much for the feedbacks.
Actually I would basically agree to most of the points mentioned by you
both. However, let me quote the original paragraph from the extended paper
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030091(not
the review article):
Considering the large population of English speakers in North America
compared to Europe, and *the fact that the Internet is most developed in
North America,* the estimation of around only half share for north
America to English WP is a puzzle, which definitely needs further
multidisciplinary studies. In the case of Simple English WP, the European
share is even larger, which is not surprising, together with the fact that
the share of **Far East** increased, since this WP is meant to be of use
by non-native speakers (though, not necessarily written by them). Note that
