There are More Wikipedia Articles Inside this Circle than Outside of It

This map points out the highly uneven spatial distribution of (geotagged) Wikipedia articles in 44 language versions of the encyclopaedia. Slightly more than half of the global total of 3,336,473 articles are about places, events and people inside the red circle on the map, occupying only about 2.5% of the world’s land area. The article locations were mapped on top of a dataset obtained from Natural Earth using Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion map projection that has little distortion of shape and area and highlights that there is no ‘right way up’. 

This uneven distribution of knowledge carries with it the danger of spatial solipsism for the people who live inside one of Wikipedia’s focal regions. It also strongly underrepresents regions such as the Middle East and North Africa as well as Sub-Saharan Africa. In the global context of today’s digital knowledge economies, these digital absences are likely to have very material effects and consequences.