What strategies and tactics are successful in increasing awareness of Wikipedia projects in a specific geographic region and how can Wikimedia empower people to implement these strategies and tactics?

Here's another spin on Woodwalker's thoughts. One indication of a strong local community is strong content about those communities.

Some interesting research and visualizations at a country scale is at this web site. The author writes:

The country with the most articles is the United States (almost 90,000 articles), while most small island nations and city states have less than 100 articles. However, it is not just microstates that are characterised by extremely low levels of wiki representation. Almost all of Africa is poorly represented in Wikipedia. Remarkably there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica than all but one of the fifty-three countries in Africa (or perhaps even more amazingly, there are more Wikipedia articles written about the fictional places of Middle Earth and Discworld than about many countries in Africa, the Americas and Asia).

User:Aprabhala posted something in a similar vein over at Talk:Task force/India. Note that this research is only from English Wikipedia. We'd want to do comparable research for specific language Wikipedias.

Compare these two images:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Earthlights_dmsp.jpg

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imageworld-artphp3.png

As far as I understand it the first image shows the surface of the earth at night , and the second the number of articles about the area (log-scale). Not very suprising, the correlation between electric light and number of articles seems to be quite high.

Now I think the following picture displays the number of named geographic places in the world: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Geonames4.png

As pointed out, the correlation between actuall places and number of articles in an area is therefore not at all as well correlated.

However, is geographic information as sought for in all regions? The amount of geographic articles in a region might be a good meassure of how represented that region is, but I don't think the most important thing is to rise the number of geographic articles in any under represented region. Rather I think the number of articles that fit together with the culture of a given region is more importan. Can e.g. articles about agriculture, music, dance and diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and HIV be of greater importance in Africa than in western countries where we maybe like to read about the Eifel tower (now I revealed my prejudices that all Africans as farming, non educated, dancing and singing people with deadly diseases, well that was not what I meant, but I hope you understand the point :) ).

Powerful images and analysis! I copied these charts and thoughts over to Local content.

I agree, geographic information is an indicator, but it's not necessarily the most important type of content. We need to get a better understanding of the type of content that would be valuable for different regions.