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Start date:
Jun 2014
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End date:
Aug 2014
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Funder:
John Fell OUP Research Fund
This project aims to develop a set of lenses for analyzing Wikipedia’s geographical scope whilst employing a reflexive analytical process to expose the makings of the ‘big data’ that we will produce.
Overview
In collaboration with a multidisciplinary group of researchers from the Oxford and Minnesota, this project aims to build a series of visualizations to investigate the geographical scope of Wikipedia. The key research question for the project is to understand to what extent Wikipedia reflects different narratives of the world in its different language versions by analysing the provenance of Wikipedia’s sources and citations. Instead of merely presenting the analyses as clean, closed visualizations, the team will document the process as it evolves, highlighting the decisions made to select particular data for each dataset. The goals of the project are twofold: to produce rigorous analyses that bring Wikipedia’s geographical scope to the forefront, and to experiment with a method and model for researchers to produce rigorous analyses that can be replicated and/or interrogated in the future.
Support
This research is supported by Oxford University’s John Fell Fund.
People
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Professor Mark Graham
Oxford Internet Institute
Principal Investigator
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Dr Heather Ford
Oxford Internet Institute
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Brent Hecht
University of Minnesota
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Dave Musicant
Carleton College
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Shilad Sen
Macalester College
Events
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Wikipedia 15th Birthday Editathon: The Social Internet
15 January 2016, 12:00:00 - 18:00:00
On Friday 15 January 2016 Wikipedia will celebrate its fifteenth birthday and we are celebrating by having a Wikipedia editathon!
Videos
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Wikipedia: User Generating the World
Duration: 00:12:38
Date: 15 January 2016
Presentation on Mark Graham's Wikipedia research, on the occasion of Wikipedia's 15th Birthday.
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Fact Factories: How Wikipedia’s Logics Determine What Facts Are Represented Online
Duration: 00:11:28
Date: 15 January 2016
Presentation on Heather Ford's Wikipedia research, on the occasion of Wikipedia's 15th Birthday.
Press
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The world wide SPREAD: Map reveals the extent of internet use around the globe – and the countries that are still not online
Date Published: 22 September 2014
Source: Daily Mail
The map of global use of websites created by Mark Graham and Stefano De Sabbata is reported in the Daily Mail. The data visualisation shows each country sized according to its internet-enable population.
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Why global contributions to Wikipedia are so unequal
Date Published: 8 September 2014
Source: The Conversation
Mark Graham authors an article explaining why the unequal global representation in Wikipedia matters and why it impedes Wikiepedia's aim to be the 'sum of all human knowledge'.
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Geotagging reveals Wikipedia is not quite so equal after all
Date Published: 18 August 2014
Source: New Statesman
Rather than being an equaliser, Wikipedia may be reproducing an established world view. Mark Graham writes about his work on inequalities in Wikipedia. For example, he says, the Middle East is massively underrepresented.
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What was the last book you read? Wikipedia wants to know
Date Published: 13 August 2014
Source: The National Opinion
The interactive map of Wikipedia created by Mark Graham and colleagues is used to demonstrate inequalities in representation on Wikipedia.