Mongolian Wikipedia: Uneven Ubiquity and Grassroots Progress

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137 Mongolian Wikipedia: Uneven Ubiquity and Grassroots Progress

mykel2

Wikipedia is ubiquitous in the United States of America. It’s a free, open collaboration encyclopedic database comprised of user-generated and user-edited articles on topics ranging from the highly specific, like “water pies” (pies whose main ingredient is water), to the very broad, like human history. Anecdotally, in spaces around the U.S., Wikipedia use is so commonplace that teachers tell their students not to reference the database when writing essays, taking it as a given that their students both know how to use the database and can use it to find accessible information pertinent to their curriculum (an assumption supported by the fact that Wikipedia currently contains at least 6,616,455 articles written in English). However, for teachers in some spaces outside of the U.S. whose official languages do not include English and whose historical and contemporary landscapes are frequently overlooked by Western reporting, such an assumption would be unfounded.

In Mongolia, internet users hoping to read or reference Wikipedia articles written in Mongolian (the official language of the nation spoken by up to 95% of the population) find that there are just 21,882 articles on Mongolian Wikipedia, the Wikipedia sub-database containing pages written in Mongolian. This number of Mongolian articles constitutes a mere .003% of the number of English articles on the site. Additionally, the number of Mongolian Wikipedia articles over-represents the number of Mongolian articles that are actually useful and credible, as many Mongolian articles are short, incomplete, and/or uncited. To exemplify, one can compare the Mongolian article on Claudius Ptolemy (one of two articles on ancient astronomers extant on Mongolian Wikipedia), which is solely comprised an uncited five-sentence-long biography, to the English article on Ptolemy (one of 44 English articles on ancient astronomers from Greece alone) which has 11 sections including a heavily cited 29-sentence-long biography. Articles written in Central Mongolic languages make up .004% of all articles on Wikipedia, and 20% of represented Central Mongolic languages are primarily spoken in Russia, not Mongolia. Potentially due to this linguistic underrepresentation, in 2016, 60% of Wikipedia users in Mongolia referenced English Wikipedia instead of Mongolian Wikipedia, and Mongolian speakers currently make up just .032% of active Wikipedia users.

Disturbed by the fact that “Mongolia’s local Wikipedia is one of [the] smallest of small Wikipedias,” in 2016, Wikipedia user Orgio89 sought a project grant for an initiative to increase local engagement with Mongolian Wikipedia. In their project proposal, Orgio89 hypothesized that the factors contributing to Mongolian Wikipedia’s low engagement levels include poor local Wikipedia development, language barriers, and local media censorship in Mongolia. To promote greater equity, Orgio89 proposed to “work closely with 10 local high schools [in] different city communities” and initiate activities in those schools like article creation contests, Wikipedia installation tutorials, and Wikipedia-based research projects. The grant proposal was accepted, and Origio98’s final report on the project’s outcomes indicated that as a result of the initiative, 198 new articles were added, along with ten new images and one new video.

Wikipedia is a powerful tool which has the ability to familiarize users with vaguely-understood subjects and connect users to novel topics previously unknown to them. However, as an analysis of Mongolian Wikipedia shows, Wikipedia’s current abilities of epistemic dispersal are limited by an unevenness of geographic and linguistic representation. Origo98’s project proves that this unevenness can be combated, shining a hopeful light on progress towards removing disparities in informational representation on Wikipedia.