Location, Location - Floatingsheep's Take on Geographies of Wikipedia in China

Floatingsheep.org, a fascinating website dedicated to mapping and analyzing user generated Google Map placemarks, so as to provide one glimpse of what internet users (in the aggregate) think about particular places, posted a fascinating article on the Geographies of Wikipedia in China.

According to the Floatingsheep, the geotagged articles in Chinese are concentrated on the more developed regions, particularly southeast part of China:



However, counting articles in all languages, the patten shifts and the emphasis is on the western region, particularly Tibet and Xianjiang:



The article argues, "It has been demonstrated that there appears to be a correlation between the locations of contributors and the topics that they write about. The fact that most Chinese Wikipedians are from eastern provinces would then seem to explain some of the differences between the geographies of Chinese Wikipedia and all other Wikipedias."

However, when I was in China in March 2010, I found that in China Wikipedia was blocked (homepage was not, but search results were).

Floatingsheep plan to revisit this topic at regular intervals in order to map any possible spatial shifts over time. I definitely will stay tuned.