33 Country Report: Wikipedia
Lara Pfrimmer
In the Czech Republic, Wikipedia utilization is quite high despite being accessed in a country where Czech is the predominant language for only that country. By analyzing Wikipedia’s provided statistics it appears as though the activity on the site is similar to how Wikipedia is used within the United States. The page displays information about edits, editors, page views, and more. All of these statistics point to high utilization of Wikipedia in the Czech Republic, as the page has nearly 800,000 pageviews in the last sixty days. The Wikipedia page also has around 4,000 active editors, with only 12% of edits coming from the top 10% of editors. This ratio indicates that lots of editors are contributing to this Wikipedia page and that the content is not just coming from the top editors, which further alludes to a high rate of user interaction with this page.
To further demonstrate high usability, in their article “Geographic intersections of languages in Wikipedia” the Oxford Internet Institute states, “over 70% of articles written in that languages are spoken predominantly in a single country (e.g. Czech or Italian) only exist in that language.” This indicates that the Czech Wikipedia contains a large amount of information for its users that cannot be accessed in another language, which creates a specific set of Wikipedia resources exclusively for Czech speakers. This data also contributes to the assumption that the majority of Wikipedia edits about the Czech Republic are created by residents of the Czech Republic. The Network Readiness Index indicates that the Czech Republic has a great foundation for internet, and thus Wikipedia, usage internally, with an overall rating of 25 out of 131 and a score of 99.9 for the country having access to a 3G mobile network or higher.
Sources:
Baily, G., & Bagshaw, S. (2014). Geographic intersections of languages in Wikipedia. Oxford Internet Institute, https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/news/geographic-intersections-of-languages-in-wikipedia/.
Czech Republic. (2022). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Republic.
Dutta, S., & Lanvin, B., & Bagshaw, S. (2022). Network Readiness Index 2022. Portulans Institute, https://networkreadinessindex.org/wp-content/uploads/reports/nri_2022.pdf.
