The Lopsided Geography of Wikipedia

Yet most of those who are coming online for the first time are doing so on mobile devices, which you can easily use to, say, make a spelling correction on a Wikipedia page, but not to contribute four paragraphs of text with 18 footnotes.

.. Wales told me that the Chinese government is presently blocking Wikipedia in its entirety, in part because of the encyclopedia’s recent move to an encrypted “HTTPS” protocol that makes it harder for the government to determine what people are reading and to selectively filter sensitive pages, as Chinese censors had done in the past.

.. “Part of the reason why Wikipedia is not the immediate kind of thing that people want to block is it’s not a wide-open free-speech message board and people aren’t getting on Wikipedia to plan a protest at a certain date, at a certain time,” Wales said.

.. What’s his pitch to Chinese authorities? “An argument that doesn’t really work very well is to sound like some kind of crazy American talking about the First Amendment. They just don’t care,” Wales said. He argues that access to knowledge is a human right, but he doesn’t dwell on that point. “The main [argument to the Chinese] is that Wikipedia is incredibly useful for economic growth, they do care about that, for education, they do care about that. For people in technology, for example, if you ask any programmer, ‘How do you keep up to date with new technology? How do you hear about some new programming language?’ They go to Wikipedia.”

.. Graham and his colleagues theorized that one of Wikipedia’s greatest strengths—its strict editorial standards, particularly with regard to sourcing—might also be one of its greatest impediments to expansion.

.. more edits originated in Hong Kong than in all of Africa combined