58 Country Report: Wikipedia

Within the English Wikipedia, the Guatemala country page is classified as a level-4 vital article in the section of Geography with a B-class content rating. Essentially this means that this page requires a high-quality article due to traffic and can currently be described as “mostly complete without major problems,” but needs a bit more work to achieve a higher status after being examined by official impartial reviewers. With regards to what the English Wikipedia covers, the country information is broken into seven main content sections; etiology, history that is broken into time periods that have a heavy focus on the colonial era and onwards, geography, government and politics, economy with a single main subsection of tourism, demographics, and culture. This is pretty much what would be expected in a wholistic coverage of content, alongside common statistics and facts (flag, anthem, legislation, currency, etc). These common statistics and facts are also present on what is called the “Simple English” page for Guatemala, a hyper- summarized version that simply gives a quick overview of the country and its population and history. However, when looking at the Spanish Wikipedia, the official and main language of Guatemala, the content coverage is structured differently. The information is broken into nine major content sections, these being: history that includes pre-colonial and ancient times, government and politics, territory organization, geography, economy with nine subsections, infrastructure, demographics, culture, and sports. The differences between the English and Spanish versions portray perhaps a different prioritization of information, as well as perhaps a different knowledge base between those who editors who contribute in English and those who contribute in Spanish.

It is worthwhile to mention that there is also WikiProject Guatemala, a “collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Guatemala on Wikipedia.” Like with the main pages, there is a Spanish version of this project (Wikiproyecto Guatemala) too. The English version has 26 sections of possible additions/expansions, while the Spanish version has 27 –  although that includes a few with random salutations by some editors, nothing that seems to add value. However, the presences of these projects indicate a desire to increase the content rating on a societal level, as well as justification and/or a sense of completion and inclusion of information on a personal level.

Considering statistics, there are a few mentionable ones that surround the main resources of English Wikipedia and Spanish Wikipedia. For the Spanish Wikipedia, Guatemala provides 80 editors a month in a contrast to one-fourth of that number (20) for the English Wikipedia. For the Spanish Wikipedia, Guatemala’s page traffic consists of 2-11 million users per month while the English Wikipedia’s page for Guatemala brings in 265 thousand – 2 million users per month. Guatemala-specific data with regards to the Wikipedia platform and its presence was not easily findable (perhaps it is not as easily tracked due to technological infrastructure capabilities), so the differences between the English format and the Spanish format is the next best option to analyze; these implications will have to suffice for an outlook on usage and editing regarding the page(s) of Guatemala. As for the presence of Guatemala pages as a whole on Wikipedia, there is a value in its coverage from resource standpoint (traffic) and a consumer standpoint (seeing the information you want to see from the perspective you want to see). Although it can be assumed that a weaker coverage of the country is due to Guatemala’s “third-world” status and the fact that many sources estimate only 44-60% of the population have reliable internet access, the discrepancies between the English and Spanish versions also provide a knowledge gap that needs to be bridged in order to provide a fairer and more holistic coverage.

Sources:

• https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/active-editors-by-country/normal|map|last-month|(activity-level)~5..99-edits|monthly
• https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/reading/page-views-by-country/normal|map|last-month|(access)~desktop*mobile-app*mobile-web|monthly
• https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala
• https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiproyecto_discusión:Guatemala#Saludos!!
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Guatemala
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala
• https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala