User:PAC2/Signpost Opinion1

Are Wikipedia articles representative of Western or world knowledge?

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Are Wikipedia articles representative of Western or world knowledge?

Wikipedia aims to represent the sum of all knowledge. Looking at mentioned human entities in articles about general topics, I show that there is often an imbalance between Western countries (Europe and North America) and the rest of the world.

This is a draft of a potential Signpost article, and should not be interpreted as a finished piece. Its content is subject to review by the editorial team and ultimately by JPxG, the editor in chief. Please do not link to this draft as it is unfinished and the URL will change upon publication. If you would like to contribute and are familiar with the requirements of a Signpost article, feel free to be bold in making improvements!

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Wikipedia aims to represent the sum of all knowledge. Looking at mentioned human entities in articles about general topics, I show that there is often an imbalance between Western countries (Europe and North America) and the rest of the world.
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Writing: 7 December 00:00 (14 days left; 73%)

Publishing: 8 December 00:00 (15 days left; 75%)

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Last revised 20:27, 22 November 2024 (UTC) (15 hours ago) by Bri (refresh)

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Signpost Opinion1

YOUR ARTICLE'S DESCRIPTIVE TITLE HERE

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By PAC2

Optional: write a lede — not necessarily a WP:LEAD. Interesting > encyclopedic.

Wikipedia aims at representing the sum of all knowledge. It is not so easy to define "the sum of all knowledge". We could expect the sum of all knowledge means knowledge from every region in the world (geographical distribution), from every era in History, from every culture, every ethnic group every gender group, etc.

Trying to measure diversity of knowledge in Wikipedia, we can look at diversity of contributors, number of Wikipedia articles, diversity of sources and references^[1] or diversity in mentioned entities inside a given article.^[2]

In this article, I look at the geographical distribution of people mentioned in an article (people mentioned with a blue link).

I apply my methodology to a selection of articles about general topics such as music, culture or knowledge in a selection of Wikipedia versions and I discuss the results.

Methodology

Given a Wikipedia article, I select all internal links (blue links) and I call them "mentioned entities". This can be done through the endpoint "links" in the MediaWiki generator API. The magic is that this API can be integrated in a SPARQL query in the Wikidata Query Service. So I combine the call to the API with a Wikidata query. I select all mentioned entities with P31 equal to Q5 (humans) with a known birthplace (P19) and I collect the country of the birthplace with property P17.

SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?itemLabel ?country ?countryLabel ?birthplace
?birthplaceLabel
WHERE {
  SERVICE wikibase:mwapi {
     bd:serviceParam wikibase:endpoint "en.wikipedia.org";
                     wikibase:api "Generator";
                     mwapi:generator "links";
                     mwapi:titles "Music";.
     ?item wikibase:apiOutputItem mwapi:item.
  } 
  FILTER BOUND (?item)
  ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q5 ; wdt:P19
?birthplace. 
  ?birthplace wdt:P17 ?country . 
SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en,mul". }
}

Click here to launch the Wikidata query

I then collect a mapping between actual countries and continents. The mapping comes from Wikidata but is consistent with United nations M49 classification^[3].

SELECT DISTINCT ?continent ?continentLabel ?country  ?code WHERE {
VALUES ?continent {
wd:Q55643
wd:Q48
wd:Q15
wd:Q18
wd:Q49
wd:Q46
} 
 ?continent (wdt:P527*) ?country.
  ?country 
    wdt:P2082 ?code.
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en,mul". }
}

Click here to launch the Wikidata query

I perform a left join of the two data frames using the Arquero JavaScript library^[4].

Finally, I regroup Europe and North America as "Western World" and the four other continents as "Rest of the world". This is an opiniated and radical approach but it makes the numbers easier to read. Places of birth which cannot be associated with a current country are labeled "Unclassified".

I've developed a user interface using Observable notebook.^[5] Users can choose two parameters: the Wikipedia project (ie "pt.wikipedia.org") and the title of the article. Parameters can be added in the url directly. For instance, you can look at article "Kennis" (ie knowledge) in Afrikaans: https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=af.wikipedia.org&article=Kennis.

All computations are performed in the appendix of the notebook. The code is open source licensed under the ISC.

Results

This approach makes sense for articles about general topics such as music, work, art, beauty, love, humanity, knowledge, education, school, religion, etc. Also it makes sense if the number of people mentioned in the article is high enough to compute percentages.

In this section, we focus in three notions, music, knowledge and culture in five languages English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Arab.

Music

Music comes from all over the world. I would expect an encyclopedic article to mention people from all the continents. Let's have a look at the numbers.

Geographical distribution of mentioned peoples in articles about music
Linguistic version	Article	Rest of the world	Unclassified	Western world
English	Music	6 (8.2%)	2 (2.7%)	65 (89.0%)^[6]
Spanish	es:Música	0 (0%)	3 (5.0%)	57 (95.0%)^[7]
French	fr:Musique	4 (6.5%)	0 (0%)	58 (93.5%)^[8]
Portuguese	pt:Música	1 (5.0%)	0 (0%)	19 (95.0%)^[9]
Arab	ar:موسيقى	23 (79.3%)	0 (0%)	6 (20.7%)^[10]

In Wikipedia in French, English, Portuguese and Spanish, the proportion of people born in Europe and North America is higher than 89%. This leaves little room for people born in Asia, Africa, South America or Oceania. Although Spanish is widely spoken in South America, the article in Spanish does not mention any musician born on this continent or in Africa, Asia or Oceania.

Knowledge

Knowledge is another general topic. One would expect the article to mention people from all over the world. Wikipedia kn English and Wikipedia in Portuguese have articles with more than 90% of mentioned entities born in Europe or North America. Wikipedia in French have too little entities and Wikipedia in Spanish has a more diversity.

Geographical distribution of mentioned peoples in articles about knowledge
Linguistic version	Article	Rest of the world	Unclassified	Western world
English	Knowledge	5 (6.4%)	2 (2.6%)	71 (91.0%)^[11]
Spanish	es:Conocimiento	1 (3.1%)	5 (15.6%)	26 (81.3%)^[12]
French	fr:Connaissance	0 (-)	0 (-)	10 (-) ^[13]
Portuguese	pt:Conhecimento	1 (3.4%)	1 (3.4%)	27 (93.1%)^[14]
Arab	ar:معرفة	6 (20.7%)	4 (13.8%)	19 (65.5%)^[15]

Culture

Looking at culture shows that the article in French lacks diversity with 96.5% of mentioned people from Europe and North America. Articles in English and Spanish are a little bit more diverse with 84.0% and 88.9% of people from Europe and North America. The article in Portuguese is a good example of diverse article with respect to our criteria with 55% people from Europe and North America.

Geographical distribution of mentioned peoples in articles about culture
Linguistic version	Article	Rest of the world	Unclassified	Western world
English	Culture	21 (12.9%)	5 (3.1%)	137 (84.0%)^[16]
Spanish	es:Culture	4 (8.9%)	1 (2.2%)	40 (88.9%)^[17]
French	fr:Culture	2 (3.5%)	0 (0%)	55 (96.5%)^[18]
Portuguese	pt:Culture	10 (20.4%)	12 (24.5%)	27 (55.1%)^[19]
Arab	ar:ثقافة	0 (-)	0 (-)	4 (-)^[20]

Discussion

Globally, the results show that in Wikipedia in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese, people born outside Europe and North America are not mentioned very often.

Of course, there are multiple layers of explanations. The total number of written sources about those topics may be higher in Europe and North America than in the rest of the world. The total number of contributors may also be higher in those regions than in the rest of the world. There is also maybe an imbalance in the number of biographies between people born in Europe and North America and people born in other continents.

Of course, nobody knows what would be the fair percentage of people born outside Europe and North America for a given Wikipedia article. But WWRW helps raise awareness of some imbalances. If people from Oceania, South America, Asia or Africa are not mentioned in an article about topic, it's worth asking why and looking for new sources which could help to add some diversity in the article.

More work is needed to measure diversity in Wikipedia articles. Anyone can plays with the WWRW tool or any other tool in "article analytics"^[21] and do his or her own report and anyone can develop new ways to measure diversity.

In this issue

23 November (all comments)

Shortcuts

This is a WikiProject, an area for focused collaboration among Wikipedians. New participants are welcome; please feel free to participate!

User:PAC2/Signpost Opinion1/Navigation

Welcome to WikiProject Pokémon, formerly known as the Pokémon Collaborative Project. Wikipedians have formed this project to improve Wikipedia's encyclopedic coverage of all Pokémon related articles. If you would like to help, be bold and jump right in! You may also add yourself to the participants list.

If you'd like to bring an article to this project's attention, mention it on the talk page as appropriate.

History

The oldest ancestor of this project was WikiProject Pokédex (and its child project WikiProject PokéNav), which created articles for many Pokémon and Pokémon characters. This project fell into inactivity due to a loss of interest, and the many stubs they created became the subject of a great deal of criticism, especially given the creation of the guidelines for the handling of fictional subjects.

This criticism led to the creation of the Poképrosal, a proposal to merge all of these stubs into lists. While this proposal met with a consensus support, it stalled when it was proposed that it must be possible to expand these Pokémon stubs.

This effort to expand these stubs into articles led to the creation of the Pokémon Adoption Center, a project that assigned stubs to individual users to expand.

When the PAC project ran out of stubs to assign, this project was founded (under the name "Pokémon Collaborative Project"), to maintain and improve the newly expanded articles.

Eventually, the interest for individual articles for every Pokémon died down, and Pokémon that were not considered to be notable were merged into lists. These lists first took the form of mega-articles containing mini-articles for individual species, though they are now shorter descriptions on each Pokémon in a table. These lists were initially organized in groups of 20 by Pokédex number (e.g. List of Pokémon (1-20)), though they were later expanded to groups of 50 (e.g. List of Pokémon (1-51)), and are now divided into the generations each Pokémon was introduced in (e.g. List of generation I Pokémon).

As the amount of Pokémon-related articles diminished, WikiProject Pokémon slowly became more inactive, and the modern lists ended up consisting of sometimes just a singular Pokédex entry. Articles on individual Pokémon, even if they were technically notable, ended up being deleted due to their poor writing and lack of reliable sources. In mid-2023, however, a renewed push through the Video game characters project to standardize and enhance articles and lists of all video game characters resulted in an increase in the number of high quality articles and lists of pokémon. This WikiProject's new aim is to improve these lists and articles, including appropriate, reliable sources and more information.

Scope

Related WikiProjects

WikiProject Games (top level project)
- WikiProject Video Games (co-ordinator project)
  - Nintendo Task Force
    - WikiProject Pokémon (this project)
  - WikiProject Square Enix
WikiProject Japan (top level project)
- WikiProject Anime and manga
  - WikiProject Digimon
  - WikiProject Yu-Gi-Oh!

Any article related to any of the various works of fiction (games, anime, manga, trading cards, etc.) in the Pokémon Universe. Here is the current list of all Pokémon articles.

Improve the general standards of Pokémon articles, aiming for Good Article status in all of them.
Get the list articles to featured list status.
More work can be found at Wikipedia:WikiProject Pokémon/index

Article status

FA	GA	B	C	Start	Stub	FL	List	Category	Disambig	Draft	File	Portal	Project	Redirect	Template	NA	???
4	57	37	56	101	12	3	56	80	12	7	178	0	9	3,390	23	52	0

Detailed status table with Importance

Pokémon articles by quality and importance
Quality	Importance
Quality	Top	High	Mid	Low	NA	???	Total
FA		1	2	1			4
FL	2			1			3
GA	16	7	20	14			57
B	7	6	15	9			37
C	3	16	14	23			56
Start		12	24	64		1	101
Stub				12			12
List	9	5	17	25			56
Category					80		80
Disambig					12		12
File					178		178
Project					9		9
Redirect			3	9	3,378		3,390
Template					23		23
Other					8		8
Assessed	37	47	95	158	3,688	1	4,026
Total	37	47	95	158	3,688	1	4,026

Featured articles

Featured lists

Good articles

Games

Other

Species

Our ultimate goal

Taken from User:Captain Galaxy/PokémonSpeciesGT.

Pokémon species

59 articles

List of generation I Pokémon

List of generation II Pokémon

List of generation III Pokémon

List of generation IV Pokémon

List of generation V Pokémon

List of generation VI Pokémon

List of generation VII Pokémon

List of generation VIII Pokémon

List of generation IX Pokémon ^(subtopic)

Article Alerts and Recent changes

Categories for discussion

14 Nov 2024 – Category:Pokémon species introduced in Pokémon Sword and Shield (talk · edit · hist) CfDed by Web-julio (t · c) was closed; see discussion
14 Nov 2024 – Category:Pokémon species introduced in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet (talk · edit · hist) CfDed by Web-julio (t · c) was closed; see discussion
14 Nov 2024 – Category:Pokémon species introduced in Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire (talk · edit · hist) CfDed by Web-julio (t · c) was closed; see discussion
14 Nov 2024 – Category:Pokémon species introduced in Pokémon Red and Blue (talk · edit · hist) CfDed by Web-julio (t · c) was closed; see discussion
14 Nov 2024 – Category:Pokémon species by game (talk · edit · hist) CfDed by Web-julio (t · c) was closed; see discussion
14 Nov 2024 – Category:Pokémon species introduced in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl (talk · edit · hist) CfDed by Web-julio (t · c) was closed; see discussion
14 Nov 2024 – Category:Pokémon species introduced in Pokémon Gold and Silver (talk · edit · hist) CfDed by Web-julio (t · c) was closed; see discussion

Featured list candidates

29 Oct 2024 – Pokémon episodes removed from rotation (talk · edit · hist) was FL nominated by Pokelego999 (t · c); see discussion

Good article nominees

12 Nov 2024 – Regi (Pokémon) (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by Pokelego999 (t · c); start discussion
24 Oct 2024 – Pokémon Scarlet and Violet (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by Pokelego999 (t · c); start discussion
02 Oct 2024 – Haunter (Pokémon) (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by Kung Fu Man (t · c); start discussion
27 Sep 2024 – Pokémon Heroes (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by Pokelego999 (t · c); start discussion
13 Aug 2024 – Pokémon Concierge (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by Pokelego999 (t · c); start discussion

List of abbreviations (help):

D: Edit made at Wikidata
r: Edit flagged by ORES
N: New page
m: Minor edit
b: Bot edit
(±123): Page byte size change

Participants

Here is a list of current participants of this project. If you wish to join, please add your username to the Active list in alphabetical order, using {{user}} (or {{admin}} if you're an Administrator). If you were previously a part of this WikiProject and your name is on the Inactive list, please remove it when you have added your name to the Active list.

Active

Inactive

Userbox

This user is a member of WikiProject Pokémon.

Members may add {{Wikipedia:WikiProject Pokémon/Userbox}} to any page in their userspace to transclude a userbox signifying their membership. Alternate colors are also available; see the documentation page for details.

Documentation and style

Templates and categories

Talk pages: {{WikiProject Pokémon}} - For generic Pokémon-related article talk pages.

Articles: {{Nintendo-stub}} - For tagging stub Pokémon articles.

Infoboxes: Wikipedia:WikiProject Pokémon/Pokémon species - Infobox for articles about a certain Pokémon. Depreciated template, preserved for historical reasons.

Images
- Category:Pokémon game covers - For cover art of video game boxes.
- Category:Television-screenshots of Pokémon - For screenshots taken from the anime.
- Category:Pokémon Trading Card Game images - For scanned images of cards from the trading card game.
- Category:Pokémon lead images - For lead Pokémon images for Pokémon species articles

Templates
- {{Pokedex}} - Used for citing the Pokédex
- {{Pokémon}} - A navigational point for the franchise

User talk
- {{Hcp2}} - For inviting new editors to join the Project.
- {{Hcp}} - For welcoming editors who've just joined the Project.

Barnstar
- {{Barnstar Pokémon}}

		The Pokémon Barnstar
		I award this barnstar to Ash Ketchum for his great improvements of pages on Pokémon species. —Professor Oak

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Are Wikipedia articles representative of Western or world knowledge?

YOUR ARTICLE'S DESCRIPTIVE TITLE HERE

Methodology

Results

Music

Knowledge

Culture

Discussion

History

Scope

Article status

Featured articles

Featured lists

Good articles

Games

Other

Species

Our ultimate goal

Article Alerts and Recent changes

23 November 2024

22 November 2024

21 November 2024

19 November 2024

18 November 2024

17 November 2024

16 November 2024

Participants

Active

Inactive

Userbox

Documentation and style

Templates and categories

Discuss this story