[Foundation-l] A question for American Wikimedians

Thu Nov 18 19:19:39 UTC 2010

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 5:53 PM, Brian J Mingus
<brian.mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
> I haven't seen the numbers lately but in the past it was true that the
> majority of Wikipedia's traffic came from Google. If that is still true it
> seems likely that Google's demographics mirror what we are seeing here. The
> implication is that what we are seeing here is indicative of the
> demographics of internet use in general, which does seem to indicate that
> these folks just aren't on the internet in the first place. There are of
> course other explanations, such as, they simply choose not to edit. But I
> believe if you check the demographic statistics from Hitwise and elsewhere
> there will be a strong correlation with this overall trend. Basically, these
> people are underprivileged in our society and it reflects in our
> demographics.

Commenting since I just looked at some of these papers...

There have been a bunch of studies on broadband adoption in the US;
there was one published just this month. According to it, 49% of black
households in the US have broadband at home; 68% of white households
do. Adoption is correlated with income and education, but even
controlling for that a greater proportion of white households use the
internet at home.
http://www.esa.doc.gov/DN/ (4.2 MB .pdf)

And a study on minority internet use specifically:
http://www.jointcenter.org/publications1/publication-PDFs/MTI_BROADBAND_REPORT_2.pdf
(844 KB .pdf)

Many who don't have broadband internet at home use it at public
libraries or community centers, but time on computers there tends to
be limited because there is more demand for computers than
availability.

But it's not *that* large a gap in access compared to how
underrepresented blacks are in the active Wikimedia community; I
expect it's more social factors than anything else.

Compare us to Twitter--there is a huge and highly visible black
community there; 26% of black internet users in the US use Twitter
(and 19% of white internet users), and also interesting to me is that
20-22% of US internet users Twitter across all income levels:
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/17-Twitter-and-Status-Updating-Fall-2009.aspx?r=1

-Kat

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