105 Country Report: Wikipedia
Swaraj Patnaik
Wikipedia exists in many other places as offshoots in the regional language and Kazakh is no exception. Established in 2011, WikiBilim joined the Wikimedia group as an effort to make the Internet’s free encyclopedia more widely available to Kazakhs. 1 Their first venture was to make Kazakh Wikipedia. 2 As of this writing, there are over 231,00 articles, which are viewed mostly by Kazakh nationals. There are about 49 million monthly page hits (which make up for 0.3% of the global Wikipedia traffic). 3 This implies that approximately 1/6 of the population who have internet access Kazakh Wikipedia. (I estimated this with the assumption that 83% of the population had internet and each person views roughly 20 articles per month.)
There are also communities for many of the languages served on Wikipedia (including Kazakh) who, “want to make knowledge accessible all over the world, especially in Kazakh language.” 4 This is the Wikimedia chapter in the country. Since all forms of Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, anywhere, exact data for who writes/edits articles in Kazakh Wikipedia are foggy, but there are 12 employees of WikiBilim. And, there is a list of about 25 users at the bottom of the Wikimedia Kazakhstan page who support the movement.
In the United States, we would see Kazakhstan in a sizeable article on the platform. 5 Many aspects of the country are broken down in the classic fashion, but there may also be hidden biases that exist on any “western” Wikipedia. Not much is better than having members of a population writing their own free encyclopedia, so the growing rate of internet access (and thus, Wikipedia access) is promising.
Footnotes:
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_Wikipedia
2 accessible at: https://kk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D1%8B_%D0%B1%D0%B5%D1%82
3 https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportPageViewsPerCountryOverview.htm
4 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Community_of_Kazakh_language_User_Group
5 accessible at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan