4 Country Report: Wikipedia

I was able to find a category within Wikipedia of “Wikipedians in Argentina,” and while I am still confused whether this is every single person editing Wikipedia within Argentina or not, the number was 258. If this is the actual number, however, this seems very small for the amount of people in the country; if the number is actually this small, it gives me reason to believe that much of the content for the Wikipedia is being created outside of the country, which would make sense given what we’ve read about geography and how a lot of information about a lot of countries does not actually come from people within the country. The home Wikipedia article of Argentina is quite extensive and detailed, having a bit of a presence on the site, so most of the editors are coming from outside the country, they are likely coming from neighboring nations in South America. I confirmed this anecdotally, as many of the users I was looking at who were editing (especially some of the sports articles) were actually from Brazil and Chile.

One interesting thing of note occurred when digging into the WikiProject Assessment of Argentina, which gets into some of the statistics regarding the actual articles themselves. According to the pie chart provided, 10,615 of the articles in Argentinean Wikipedia analyzed are classified in the “Stub” category of quality (a large portion of the chart), meaning that they “provide very little meaningful content” and that “readers probably see insufficiently developed features of the topic.” In addition to this, a further analysis of the quality of the articles includes an analysis of the relative importance of the topics covered, of which 10,524 articles are considered “low importance” while 8,729 are “NA importance.” These statistics (and the fact that they’re actively included in the Argentina WikiProject while they are not in the United States) speak to an important fact that should be known about the Argentina Wikipedia: where there is a plethora of content available and many articles exist, a small proportion of them are significant or informationally meaningful, meaning much of the content is just fluff and there is not a ton of attention given to ensure that the Wikipedia is producing quality content the way there might be in other locations.

Despite this analysis of the articles themselves, I found the ones I looked at to be pretty extensive and well-researched, with a lot of happenings in the “Discussion” section behind the scenes to make them better. There was a lot of historical information to be found, and most of the pages I found were pretty long (although this does not always make the quality better). All in all, Wikipedia seems to have a sizable influence in the country, and although the articles statistically are of lower quality, it has a big presence with a lot of content which I would expect from a country of its size and regional influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedians_in_Argentina

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Argentina/Assessment

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discusi%C3%B3n:Argentina

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentina