Ladies and Gentleman of the Wikipedia Review, it is my great pleasure to introduce to you, my new blog: On Wikipedia (named somewhat in honor of the classic On War). Along with coauthor, known as "Fact Man", I hope to present new and insightful views on Wikipedia. The blog begins with an introductory series entitled "Who's On Wikipedia?" by my co-author.

The highlights of the first two posts of "Who's on Wikipedia", for those of you too lazy to actually go read my new site:

• 80% of BLPs are of men
• Roughly half of all Wikipedia biographies are of people from the US, UK, and Canada
• Sweden and Norway seem to be bizarrely overrepresented among WP BLPs

So you're saying that Wikipedia discriminates against men?

Looks good so far!

(I caught one typo, though -- I think it was an "an" instead of a "than".)

You know, your "Fact Man" is reminiscent of my old Facts On Call business. People might think I'm your partner, Limey!

Goes along with more than half being minor sports figures. (Yes, I know women play football. Spare me.)

You mean half of WP BLPs on en.wiki, the English language WP?

Well, these are the three countries with the largest number of primary English speakers who have access to the internet, yes? Again, not surprising. You'd find the same thing with any local thing, like streetnames (on the English WP, more streetnames will be those from English-speaking countries). The main damning fact here is that the fact that BLPs DO track spoken language means we ARE getting into the BLPs of parochially notable people, very much like local street names. That's what's not good.

Are you sure you got past last names starting with "A"?

You mean there are a lot of bizarre Swedes and Norwegians with BLPs? Maybe that's just a fair representation of the populations of those countries. Or are there lots of articles about Swedish models (no doubt mostly written by Horsey)? I think we need some specific examples to asess the situation.

And it's harder to find famous Norwegians than famous Belgians so full marks to someone for ingenuity!

Yes, the study was just the English Wikipedia, and you're right that this is hardly surprising, although it is interesting to note that relative to population, Canada is overrepresented and the US is actually underrepresented compared to the UK and Canada.

As for all the Scandinavian biographies, Fact Man did use MZMcBride's random tool, so there shouldn't be an alphabetical effect, but of course if McBride's tool is crap, then so is the sample.

Welcome to the Wiki-critical blogosphere!
You are off to a fine start...

Thanks! We hope to put on a good blog, and we're also happy to have guest bloggers anytime that someone has something interesting to say, particularly in the vein of interesting research. If you'd like to contribute, just let us know.