Dear all,
Recently I have gathered and plotted the world Internet users from 2000
onwords based on three different world geographic categorization schemes:
UN, World Bank, and CIA
http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/hanteng/2015/03/18/the-new-internet-world-un-wor…
In this blog post, I have noticed that the Wikimedia Foundation's
geographic categorization seems to be different from the Stats page and the
International development team, signaling out the distinct absence/presence
of the category of Middle East and North Africa (MENA), a category that is
used only in the World Bank categorization scheme.
Personally I do not have any preferences of any of the categorization
schemes, I believe in open data, open research, and open solutions. So it
is up to researchers and practitioners to decide which categorization
schemes to use.
Nonetheless, it points to a practice gap in the current research into
" global Wikimedia content and communities". Thus I raise a few questions
in the blog post as below in terms how we can systematically compare and
share the Wikimedia's global activities in editing, viewing, fundraising
and fund dissemination:
The above charts no only show the important baselines for any Websites
(assuming that Internet users are also Web users) for their global
strategies for growth, but also demonstrate the importance of the choice of
geographic categorization scheme. .....
...., it is relevant and important if the Wikimedia Foundation can release
its global activities, including the viewing, editing and fundraising
numbers so that researchers and Wikipedians can compare those numbers with
the world distribution of Internet users. It would be interesting to see,
for example, how the funds are raised from around the world and then
distributed across different geographic regions, per Internet user.
To me, I believe that data aggregation reports to the level of any of
the three geographic categorization schemes (CIA, worldbank, and UN) should
have much less privacy concerns and thus should be reported regularly, if
not monthly, at least annually.
Feel free to forward it to another mailing list of the larger Wikimedia
family if you found it relevant.
Best,
han-teng liao