90 Country Report: Wikipedia
Emily Potter
Asia is the most populated continent in the world, while India is the second most populated country only to China. Therefore, these countries consume the internet and the data on it the most compared to anywhere else in the world. In fact, India has the second most internet users total with 658 million. Yet, the country of India still doesn’t have the same amount of access to the amount of information on the internet like Western countries do. This can be shown through one of the largest internet databases, Wikipedia.
India uses Wikipedia a lot. According to Wikimedia Statistics, India has viewed the 5th most Wikipedia pages, at 868 million pages. The writers on Wikipedia are also mostly from Europe or North America. Although India is the only country from another continent in the top 10 countries of the writers, with 3%. It’s good that such a large country has an influence on the platform, although not enough considering that India is larger than 17% of the world’s overall population.
The Wikipedia webpage in India in English is very similar to the one in Hindi, one of India’s official languages. They both contain the country’s history as a civilization, the prominent religions there, and what kind of government they have. Although one issue about the information online is it often isn’t contributed by all people from everywhere. On the “India” page on English Wikipedia, I saw that many of the writers are from countries in Europe, with a few from India. Overall on English Wikipedia, there are about 5 thousand writers from India, while Hindi Wikipedia has 590 editors from India. On English Wikipedia, there are over 6 billion articles, but on Hindi Wikipedia there are about 155 thousand. This leaves the question; how much access do people all around the world have to necessary information?
References: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=India&action=history&offset=&limit=250