146 – Comparing Wikipedia to China, Macedonia and Barbados

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Frank San Miguel (“software geek, boat builder, musician and a veteran of a number of internet startups”, including what became mapquest.com) alerted me to this nifty little map he made, inspired by some maps on this site. The data for this map were culled from these Wikipedia contributor statistics.

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“Compare the population of world countries to the Wikipedia contributors. In the hierarchy of users the vast majority of visitors to Wikipedia, 48 million of them, are readers; for the most part they don’t edit articles. Next are the regular contributors who contribute between 5 and 100 times per month. There are about 77,000 of those. Finally, there are the 10,000 anchor contributers (I’ve borrowed this phrase from retail marketing) who contribute more than 100 times per month.”

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“So if Wikipedia readers are like China, then the regular contributors are like Macedonia and the anchor contributors are like Barbados. To extend this analogy to absurd extremes, Barbados and Macedonia do all of the work, have the highest GDP and provide humanitarian aid to China!”

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Here‘s Frank San Miguel’s business website. This is his blog. And here‘s his post on the Wikipedia map.

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