Country Report: Wikipedia

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43 Country Report: Wikipedia

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While Wikipedia is a well-known source of fast and readily available information for many, it is not as widely used abroad as one might think. According to Wikimedia statistics, about 6 million page views per month come from El Salvador. El Salvador has a total population of about 6.5 million. This shows that Salvadoran citizens are not using Wikipedia pages as much as one might think. In comparison, the United States has 3 billion page views per month with only 33.1.4 million citizens. Along with this, there are only about 20 editors who have made five or more edits, whereas, in the United States, we see that there are at least 22k active editors. For editing pages that regard information on El Salvador, there is a Wikipedia WikiProject for central America that oversees the WikiProjects for Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Panama. These WikiProjects are designed to help organize the data, information, and edits made about these countries.

There is a lot of information about El Salvador on Wikipedia. The sources used to create these Wikipedia pages range from the 1970s to now, and many of the sources have been retrieved recently. The most recent edit made on the El Salvador page was February 9th. Much of the newer information added was about El Salvador’s economy, specifically adding bitcoin as legal tender and covid-19 information regarding the country. Unfortunately, El Salvador, as with many central American countries, is directly tied to gang violence and is seen by much of American media as violent people. MS-13 is a gang that originated in Los Angeles, California, to protect El Salvadoran immigrants from other gang violence. A majority of the member is from Salvadorans, and in the 1980s, many of these gang members were deported back to El Salvador. Along with this, when you look up English language traffic for the MS-13 Wikipedia page, there are 9,762,738 views and only 2,008,134 views in Spanish. However, when you look at the traffic for the Salvadoran civil war, you see that the amount of English language page views is only 16,681 and only 6,793 for Spanish language views. This is just one of many examples of how El Salvador and other Central American countries and their citizens are seen as threats, yet their situations, history, culture, etc., are not discussed enough in the media and worldwide. These information biases then cause certain Wikipedia pages about this country to see more or less traffic.

We see there is not a lot of web traffic on the web pages for El Salvador. However, the traffic that does occur is different based on the languages it was viewed in. Looking at the language views, we see that the top language views are for English and them Spanish. In Charter 1 below, we see that the page views for the El Salvador page are at 7,774,510 and that this is one spike in the traffic to this site in June of 2021. It turns out that US new sources have, along with a few other countries, have done reports on the El Salvadoran government being the first nation to make Bitcoin legal tender for the country. Comparatively, when we look at Charter 2, the page views of the El Salvador Wikipedia page in Spanish the page views are at 4,837,680. There was also a web traffic spike in March of 2020 when the El Salvadoran government issued a 30-day lockdown due to covid-19, where only one member of each family and select essential worker were allowed out of the home. We also see some other spikes in web traffic in this chart that we don’t see in the English web traffic chart. Overall, Wikipedia as a site is not as well used in El Salvador. Still, it is a good source of information on Salvadoran history, economics, and politics for many English and Spanish Speakers.