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Comment by foobarbazqux | Hacker News Reader

It's important to remember that these are the films that have been influential on English-speaking Wikipedia editors. 75% of editors are under 30, 90% are male. 76% of edits are to the English Wikipedia. I couldn't find any numbers but I believe there's a similar bias towards white Americans, simply based on the demographics of the US, UK, Australia, NZ, and Canada.

Influential films for white male Americans under 30 that also choose to edit Wikipedia? Sure.

To be clear, I thought this was an interesting technique and visualization. I like that it's influence by year instead of the top 100 influential films of all time, with Citizen Kane at the top.

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I wonder how similar or different the numbers would be if the sample was a perfect representation of the world population?

I don't know what the situation is like everywhere in the world, but having visited Europe since the 90's, it was pretty clear Hollywood dominated movies/music (and obviously here in Canada too). So while we might all have our specific picks that are influential to us (whether it's a thought-provoking European movie or an American epic movie), it may end up being not so different in the end? Though the billions in Asia may sway it :)

This is probably an interesting read for those who care: http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic152447.files/rose...

Good point - this is a view of the English speaking world as an aggregate. I'm hoping to re-run this experiment on non-US Wikipedia sites. If there are any interesting differences I'll try to put together a new visualization :)

Sounds cool. Non-Hollywood films would also be interesting.

True. For what it's worth, Wikipedia has project pages explicitly addressing this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Counterin...

Even at best, though, an Internet project is inevitably going to be biased towards the POV of whoever uses the Internet. The solution is to expand Internet access, which quickly reduces to the problem of solving all of the social problems nobody's been able to solve yet. Piece of cake.

Thanks for pointing out those pages.

I think greater internet access would certainly help, but it's not a panacea as far as Wikipedia is concerned. It might be that no matter what happens, a specific majority demographic with respect to age, income, eduction, and gender will choose to edit an online NPOV collaborative encyclopedia.

Just discovered (under Systemic bias) that the Dutch wikipedia is the second biggest. That's pretty awesome of us Dutchies! (I also read ones that the Dutch are 4th or something on torrent uploads. Brilliant.)

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