New research by the Oxford Internet Institute of Oxford University, in the United Kingdom, has revealed that almost half of the editors of the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, come from only five countries in the world.
The research has shown that France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States dominate the information bank to the extent that these countries have editing powers 100 times that of sub-Sahara Africa.
According to Take Part, the researchers looked at geo-tagged data from when the platform was launched in 2001 all the way up to 2013, on where Wikipedia editors lived. They then analyzed the geo-tagged edits on more than 4 million articles, including 708,000 from Wikipedia in English, and the result was that when it comes to developing nations, “local voices rarely represent and define their own country.”
In the past, Wikipedia has come under intense criticisms for being male-dominated. An estimated 90 percent of the editors were said to be men. It has however moved to balance the scale recently but the gap is still wide.
Lead author of the study, Professor Mark Graham, said the study showed the hegemony of the global north against that of the south, and that European and North American editors present the view of the rest of the world on the platform.
“Wikipedia is widely touted as one of the web’s most open and most inclusive platforms. But we see that low-income countries are represented far less than locations that are economically advantaged. Europe and North America, with already high levels of internet access, have the loudest voices, and they largely define the worldview of even the smaller, less affluent countries rather than the people who live in them,” Graham said.
The study revealed that the trend is a danger to accurate and unbiased information, as those who edit information they do not have knowledge about can misrepresents facts. Professor Graham also made the same point by using Jerusalem as a typical example.
“If you ask a Swedish person, an Israeli and a Palestinian whether Jerusalem should be listed in the article about the city as a capital of any country, you might get three different answers. That it is not officially the capital of anywhere, that it is the capital of Israel, and that it is the capital of Palestine. When we think of knowledge like this as socially constructed rather than as objective facts, then it starts to matter what perspectives editors bring to the table,” he said.
However, the study admitted that it did not consider, in much detail, whether there are significant examples of racial or class bias, for example, in what editors from North America and Europe are including in entries about people, places, and issues in the Global South.
What it did emphasize was that there are small number of people from Africa, South America and Asia contributing to a platform that was supposed to be a bank of accurate and unbiased information to the whole world.
Internet access is sometimes a challenge in parts of the Global South, which is generally less wealthy than countries north of the equator, but commentators say that is not an excuse for the north to represents the views of the south.
You want to support Anonymous Independent & Investigative News? Please, follow us on Twitter: Follow @AnonymousNewsHQ
This Article (Access To Accurate Global Information: Europe and United States Editors Dominate Wikipedia) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and AnonHQ.com.
