Who represents the Arab world online? Mapping and measuring local knowledge production and representation in the Middle East and North Africa

Dr Mark Graham

Tel: +44 (0)1865 287203

Email: mark.graham@oii.ox.ac.uk

Overview

There are obvious gaps in access to the Internet, particularly the participation gap between those who have their say, and those whose voices are pushed to the sidelines. Despite the rapid increase in Internet access, there are indications that people in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region remain largely absent from websites and services that represent the region to the larger world.

We explore this phenomenon through one of the MENA region's most visible and most accessed source of content: Wikipedia. It currently contains over 9 million articles in 272 languages, far surpassing any other publicly available information repository. It is widely considered the first point of contact for most general topics, thus making it an effective site for framing any subsequent representations. Content from Wikipedia also has begun to form a central part of services offered elsewhere on the Internet.

Wikipedia is therefore an important platform from which we can learn whether the Internet facilitates increased open participation across cultures, or reinforces existing global hierarchies and entrenched power dynamics. Because the underlying political, geographic and social structures of Wikipedia are hidden from users, and because there have not been any large scale studies of the geography of these structures and their relationship to online participation, groups of people may be marginalized without their knowledge.

This relative lack of MENA voice and representation means that the tone and content of this globally useful resource that represents MENA, in many cases, is being determined by outsiders with a potential misunderstanding of the significance of local events, sites of interest and historical figures. Furthermore, in an area that has seen substantial social conflict, participation from local actors enables people to ensure balance in content about contentious issues. Unfortunately, most research on MENA's Internet presence has been drawn from anecdotal evidence, and no comprehensive studies currently exist.

This project will therefore employ a range of (primarily quantitative) methods to assess the connection between access and representation, using MENA as the first step in an assessment of the inequalities in the global system.

Research Objectives

Our key academic objective is to discern the visibility of the MENA region, and residents of the MENA region, in the production of online knowledge. To do this, we outline a number of more specific objectives:

• To examine whether there are disproportionately fewer articles on the MENA region compared to the rest of the world, and of these articles, whether authors from MENA will comprise disproportionately fewer of the contributors.

• To determine if the centralized political structure of Wikipedia undervalues new contributors from MENA. In particular, we explore whether authors from MENA have their contributions undermined because of: competitive practices such as content deletion; indifference to content created by authors from MENA; and marginalization through bullying or dismissal.

Our key practical objective is to find the appropriate social mirror that will effectively represent Wikipedia's presentation of MENA content and MENA contributors in such a way as to facilitate more content, more accurate content and more effective knowledge transfer between MENA and other global regions.

We intend to do this through both community outreach workshops and a website resource that enables individuals to compare the breadth and quality of articles on areas of similar population size across MENA.

Support

This project is supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

People

Project Leads

• Dr Mark Graham, Oxford Internet Institute

• Dr Bernie Hogan, Oxford Internet Institute

Researchers

• Dr Ilhem Allagui, American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

• Richard Farmbrough (Research Assistant)

• Dr Ali Frihida, Tunis National School of Engineering

News

• Geography, Big Data, and Augmented Realities

  1 August 2012 Oxford Internet Institute

  New digital dimensions of place profoundly affect the ways that we interact with our urban environments. Dr Mark Graham leads a research project to interrogate these virtual layers of the city, asking what they are, where they are, and why they matter.

• OII Recognised as Educational Institution of the Year at Wikimedia UK's Annual Conference

  15 June 2012 Oxford Internet Institute

  The OII has been recognised as Educational Institution of the Year at the "UK Wikimedian of the Year" awards (12 May 2012). The award was made largely in recognition of the work by OII Research Fellow Dr Mark Graham to map and visualise Wikipedia data.

• Wikipedia world: an interactive guide to every language. Infographic map

  4 April 2012 The Guardian

  In 'Show and Tell' on the Guardian Data Store, Simon Rogers, winner of the OII award for best internet journalist in 2011, highlights the Mapping Wikipedia project which shows millions of articles worldwide in a variety of languages.

• Wikipedia Language Maps Created By Oxford Internet Institute's Mark Graham

  13 November 2011 Huffington Post

  "Mark Graham led a team of researchers who broke down Wikipedia's geotagged articles by language and examined the global scope of the encyclopedia. They plotted these data onto maps of the world to show the spread of languages within the encyclopedia."

• This Map Shows the World of Wikipedia Broken Down by Languages

  11 November 2011 Gizmodo US

  "Ever wondered if anyone outside your redneck little town writes about it on Wikipedia? Or if anyone has ever written about Australia in Arabic? Guess no longer, because someone's worked it out for you."

• The world of Wikipedia's languages mapped

  11 November 2011 Guardian Datablog

  What happens if you map every geotagged Wikipedia article - and then analyse it for language use? A team of Oxford University researchers has found out.

Blog

• Virtuous Visible Circles: mapping views to place-based Wikipedia articles

  Mark Graham on 5 Nov 2012 08:32AM

  We know that Wikipedia matters to the construction of geographical imaginations of place, and content in the encyclopaedia has immense power to augment our spatial understandings and interactions. However, I have yet to see many empirical analysis of the [...]

• dominant Wikipedia language by country

  Mark Graham on 29 Oct 2012 07:41AM

  I devote a lot of energy to writing about the layers of information that augment our world and why they matter. Some of this work has further explored how not just the quantity or thickness of layers of information matter, but also their audiencing. In [...]

• comparing the geographies of Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian Wikipedias

  Mark Graham on 26 Jul 2012 11:46AM

  As part of our efforts to map the geographies of Wikipedia (with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa), I thought that it would be worth taking a quick look at the layers of content in the Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian Wikipedias.I'm unsure why we [...]

• More Digital Divisions of Labour: a comparison of English and Arabic Wikipedias

  Mark Graham on 12 Jun 2012 15:40PM

  A few weeks ago, I posted a map comparing English and French Wikipedias. We, perhaps unsurprisingly, found that there was more written in French about much of the Francophone world, more written in English about the Anglophone world, and then more [...]

• Adieu French: comparing English and French Wikipedias

  Mark Graham on 23 May 2012 08:01AM

  The English and French Wikipedias are the world's first and third largest versions of the encyclopedia (containing 3.9 and 1.3 million articles respectively).   I thought that it might be instructive to compare the geographic coverage [...]

• Mapping Wikipedia edits from Europe

  Mark Graham on 12 May 2012 13:34PM

  I'm still playing with our database of Wikipedia edits (which tells us how many contributions to the encyclopedia originate in each country) and made two more maps of Europe. The height of each country represents the number of edits originating [...]

• Hiring a part-time research assistant to do statistical, spatial, and social analysis

  Mark Graham on 8 May 2012 17:28PM

  Bernie Hogan and I are hiring a part-time Research Assistant to carry out research into the geography and social structure of Wikipedia in the Middle East and North Africa through large-scale data analysis. The position will involve the analysis of [...]

• Augmented information and the reproduction of visibility

  Mark Graham on 4 May 2012 11:23AM

  I spend a lot of time thinking about the geographies of information that augment our planet (e.g. see a paper on augmented realities and uneven geographies that I recently wrote with Matt Zook). And many people ask me why the layers of information about [...]

• Interactive Wikipedia mapping tool

  Mark Graham on 3 Apr 2012 17:50PM

  We know by now that all online platforms have distinct, and highly uneven, geographies. Wikipedia is no exception: and we therefore decided to make a tool that would allow people to explore what, and where, the world's most [...]

• Mapping Edits to Wikipedia from the Middle East and North Africa

  Mark Graham on 26 Mar 2012 12:40PM

  As a quick follow-up to one of my previous posts showing the geography of edits to Wikipedia, I wanted to share another map depicting the huge inequalities in where contributions to the encyclopedia in the MENA region come from.  In [...]

• Mapping Edits to Wikipedia from Africa

  Mark Graham on 22 Mar 2012 09:56AM

  A few days ago I blogged about a map that I made which depicts where edits to Wikipedia come from in Africa. I decided to play with the data some more in order to create this graphic.It still visualises the number of edits created from each country, but [...]

• Mapping Edits from Africa in Wikipedia

  Mark Graham on 16 Mar 2012 19:57PM

  A few weeks ago, I wrote a post examining where Wikipedia edits come from. The map below drills into the data in slightly more detail in order to visualise where edits in Africa come from (the data include edits to all language versions of Wikipedia).The [...]

• Where do Wikipedia edits come from?

  Mark Graham on 17 Feb 2012 14:56PM

  Our team recently decided to look at the origins of edits to Wikipedia articles. The results are striking. But given what we already know about the uneven geographies of Wikipedia are perhaps not that shocking.To make these maps we took quarterly data [...]

• Open invitation to a workshop in Amman: Middle Eastern Participation and Presence in Wikipedia

  Mark Graham on 1 Feb 2012 12:50PM

  Your voice matters. Come and share your experience and opinions about Wikipedia with other Wikipedians, wiki producers, researchers, and representatives from the Wikimedia Foundation during a two-day workshop. The goal of the workshop is to talk about and [...]

• (Untitled)

  Mark Graham on 1 Feb 2012 15:18PM

  دعوة للمشاركة في ورشة عمل بخصوص ويكيبيدياتسرنا دعوتكم لورشة عمل بخصوص ويكيبيديا لمدة يومين و تضم ثلة من الباحثين و ممثلي مؤسسة وكيميديا، نتبادل خلالها الأفكار و الخبرات حول ويكيبيديا بمشاركة خبراء و منتجين و مهتمين بشأن ويكيبيديا.الغاية من هذه الورشة هي [...]

• Mapping Wikipedia Article Quality in the Middle East

  Mark Graham on 5 Jan 2012 12:00PM

  "Knowledge is a public good and increases in value as the number of people possessing it increases" - John WilbanksFew would disagree with the above quote, but a key issue is that the production of knowledge is far from evenly [...]

• Wikipedia Article Quality in Africa

  Mark Graham on 3 Jan 2012 12:00PM

  Out of all of the parts of the world in which we've looked at the geographies of Wikipedia articles, it is Africa that is characterised by some of the most interesting patterns. The most obvious fact is that there is simply a lack of information [...]

• Article Quality in English Wikipedia

  Mark Graham on 10 Dec 2011 17:14PM

  Expanding on the maps of Wikipedia quality (i.e. the maps of South Asia and the Swahili version of Wikipedia) posted earlier on this blog, I want to offer a visualisation of all articles on the planet shaded according to the number of words in each [...]

• The Geography of Wikipedia: Article Quality in South Asia

  Mark Graham on 5 Dec 2011 22:07PM

  The maps of Wikipedia posted on this blog offered useful insights into the geographies of one of the world's largest platforms for user-generated content. They reiterated some of the massive inequalities in the layers of information that augment [...]

• Drilling down into maps of Swahili Wikipedia

  Mark Graham on 30 Nov 2011 19:55PM

  The global scale map of Swahili Wikipedia posted on this blog a few weeks ago (also reproduced below) sparked a lot of discussion about what exactly was going on in Turkey. There aren't many articles in the Swahili version of Wikipedia. But, of the [...]