12 Country Report: Wikipedia
maher196
The use of Wikipedia in Argentina is fairly high compared to other Latin American countries. According to Wikimedia Statistics, it has 102 million page views (requests for the content of a web page) which is the third highest amount in Latin America after Brazil and Mexico. There are 230 active editors (a person who has 5 or more edits), again the third highest in Latin America. There are 249 user pages, or “Wikipedians in Argentina” and 72 “Argentine Wikipedians”, people who are citizens or natives of Argentina.
There are some differences between the English and Spanish versions of the Wikipedia page on Argentina. Both are pretty extensive with information on a wide variety of topics, however the Spanish version is longer, with about 200 more sources and a lot more pictures. In the Spanish version, there is more written about government, geography, and culture compared to the English version. The Spanish version is of higher quality, with a ranking of “outstanding”, while the English article used to be “good” but was then removed from that list. From looking at the talk pages of the “Argentina” article, there appear to be a variety of people who edit this page. For example, in the English version, there have been recent edits by a person whose first language is Spanish but is advanced in English and is a “Wikifairy”, a person from Toronto, Canada, and a WikicleanerBot. In the Spanish version, many recent edits have been made by a user who has created 2599 articles in Spanish, so he has committed a lot of time to contributing to Spanish Wikipedia. Overall, the editors of the English version seem to come from more places, while editors of the Spanish version are more likely to be from Argentina or other Spanish-speaking countries.
I found two interesting articles after searching “Wikipedia and Argentina” in Global Newsstream. One was about the inclusion of indigenous languages. Versions of indigenous languages such as Guarani were added with help from editors working with teachers and students at the University of Buenos Aires, for the purposes of preserving culture. There are 1500 articles in Guarani, mostly short articles about geography. This shows that although there are versions representing smaller, ‘endangered’ languages, the quality of the content is still important to consider in looking at representations. The second article was about the lack of biographies on female Argentinian soccer players; there are 5503 of men and only 39 of women. The greatest challenge in efforts to minimize this gap is finding reliable references to cite, since female players are not covered as much. This issue extends past soccer; the Wikimedia Argentina’s community support officer said that only 22.8% of biographies on Spanish Wikipedia are on women.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Wikipedians_in_Argentina&from=A
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Argentine_Wikipedians
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Argentina&offset=20210819011517|1039489159&action=history
https://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Argentina&action=history
https://www.proquest.com/globalnews/docview/921748259/6500997EC97C4826PQ/1?accountid=9783
https://www.proquest.com/docview/2134758342/58590377EE1B4E2APQ/4?accountid=9783