By combining demographic birth data from the United Nations World Population Prospects with biography counts by year and country of birth, I provides new insights into geographical bias on Wikipedia.
5 years after my first notebooks, I’m still in love with Observable Notebook. It’s such a pleasure to explore data using Observable.
I think it’s the first time that I take advantage of the duckdb client.
Whoa! This is extensive. Amazing. Though, honestly, I’m just skimming quickly, and I’d love some shorter opinionated summary at the top!
I guess this map is sort of the “bottom line”, yeah?
So: the “global north” is overrepresented; the Anglosphere is overrepresented. Within the north, it’s striking that nowhere in Asia seems to be particularly well-represented.
I find “one dot per country” a little hard to read. Of course, a choropleth has its own issues, overrepresenting geographic area. Oh, so maybe this is really the “bottom line”:
That’s the most helpful and interesting chart in there for me! It’s a very reasonable and understandable choice of axes, but, without labels for the individual dots, it took me a while to understand what I was looking at. I had to hunt and peck through the interactive tooltips. (Of course the first thing I do is find my own country on there, as many probably do.) It’d be cool to statically label large countries, significant countries, or outliers. You could also have a text input that highlights a given country. Maybe color the dots by continent? Or you could go all Hans Rosling and also size the dots by population!
