Ever wondered if anyone outside your bogan little town writes about it on Wikipedia? Or if anyone has ever written about Australia in Arabic? Guess no longer, because someone’s worked it out for you.
These maps from a bunch of researchers at the University of Oxford show what language geo-tagged Wikipedia posts are written in. Each of the yellow dots represents a human effort that’s has gone into describing some place, and there’s a different map for each language’s Wikipedia site.
The English language map (above) is pretty astounding. There ain’t much of the US, Europe or India which hasn’t been described in our mother tongue, that’s for sure. It also suggests there’s really not much to say about places in Russia, Northern Africa or our very own Australia. At least, not in English.
But more interesting are the maps created in other languages. Take a look at the one below, which shows geo-tagged articles written in Arabic.
Now, admittedly, there are only 24,000 geo-tagged entries in the Arabic Wikipedia. But it’s interesting how much of Europe is covered in the Arabic language. Also, someone, somewhere really cares about writing about every county in Georgia. In Arabic. Each to their own, I guess.
[The Guardian; Images: Oxford Internet Institute]