177 Country Report: Wikipedia
Hikari Nawa
Since the majority of the languages spoken in Turkey is Turkish and Turkish are primarily spoken within Turkey, it is probably the best to search for how widely Wikipedia is used in Turkey by looking up in Turkish. In Turkish, there are 35 subcategories under the country Turkey. This is more than 15 subcategories found under the United States in English and 14 subcategories found under Japan in Japanese. Even though the page numbers for subcategories under Turkey tend to be less than the United States or Japan, this could indicate that Turkish Wikipedia covers a broader content rather than focusing on specific categories.
It can be said that in Turkey, Wikipedia is regarded relatively highly among the citizens for its coverage of contents, being nominated for Golden Spider Web Awards—known as the “Web Oscars” for Turkey—in 2006. However, in 2017, the Turkish government blocked the domestic access to Wikipedia likely to avoid the critical coverage of the governmental decisions. The ban was only recently lifted in 2020 after a court case ruled that the ban was violating the freedom of expression. This reveals that the relationship between Turkish Wikipedia and the national government has not been the best. Due to the three-year long censorship, it is possible that a significant amount of edits in Turkish were suspended, impacting the number of articles and edits.
In terms of the number of edits that are made to the Wikipedia by active users, Turkey internationally places at the 16th with 3,946 people. Furthermore, the number of registered users in Turkey amounts to 1,369,771 names, which is 1.6% of the population. This might not sound like a significant ratio, but compared to Japan where the users are 1.5% of the population, this number is relatively high for the number of edits and articles. Since the citizens of Turkey are more involved in Wikipedia, it could indicate that there are more chances for the edits to be biased and incorrect. However, this also shows that despite the censorship from the government, people in Turkey are encouraged and willing to have access and seek for information based on the results from Wikipedia.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Wikipedia
https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategori:Türkiye
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:日本
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Özel:İstatistikler