Where in the World is Wikimedia?

A Shiny application for exploring the nations pageviews to Wikimedia projects come from, on a per-project basis.

Authors: Oliver Keyes, Sarah Laplante
License: MIT
Status: Stable

Description

Wikimedia properties receive 125,000 requests every second, for myriad projects and from myriad countries. Too little of it is made available to third-party researchers, due to an understandable and laudable desire to avoid compromising the privacy of our users. So instead, we analyse it ourselves.

Part of the analysis we perform is high-level geolocation: investigating the idea that where our traffic comes from has implications for systemic bias and reach. This is /also/ work that third-parties do really well. We've decided to release a high-level dataset of geodata, to assist these researchers in their work. This tool represents a simple attempt to visualise it and make it explorable.

Datasets and reuse

The canonical form of the datasets is hosted on Figshare, and is released under the CC-0 public domain dedication. It can be cited as:

Keyes, Oliver (2015) Geographic Distribution of Wikimedia Traffic