Legitimate decreases need to be considered, too.

It's not clear how a study of editor retention relates to systemic bias, in particular geographic bias. Most of the editors we are worried about retaining have little or no interest in writing about under-served geographic regions. To get more articles about a place like Botswana, we would have to attract more editors from there, something we have never been able to do very well, whether or not we retain the existing editors.

The other problem is that systemic bias is not solely a feature of Wikipedia, but also of our available sources. Recruiting a bunch of editors from, say Botswana isn't going to lead to the same density of articles we get for similar sized regions in the US and Europe because the source raw material is much sparser, both online and in print. To overcome Wikipedia's geographic bias, we'd basically have to give places like Botswana a modern publishing industry, which would probably require solving the North-South economic divide. Good luck with that.

If Wikipedia really wants to cover under-served regions of the world, then we probably need to relax our requirements for notability and against original work, for those areas. A lot of our "missing" information might not be published at all, or not in English. It's hard enough for native English speakers to defend an article with sources in English against deletionists; imagine sending Botswanans into that snake pit. In areas of the world with inadequate sources, Wikipedia would probably have to take on more of the work we currently delegate to the publishing industry.

It seems to me that part of the systemic bias is due to deletionist behaviour, particularly these (bad) deletion reasons:

• I'm not interested, therefore it's not interesting
• I've never heard of it, therefore it's not notable
• I looked for sources using an anglicized name, and found nothing; therefore there are no reliable sources
• I can't read the sources (I only read english) and have never heard of them, therefore they are unreliable
• This is bizarre (not my native customs), therefore it's "fringe" and should be deleted

Eliminate this kind of illogic, and there'd still be some bias, based on editors' interests, but wikipedia article density would come closer to actual source density.

And that's enough; I don't think anyone expects wikipedia to go beyond that. And realistically, it wouldn't match even actual source density - too few people who read language X chose to edit language Y's wikipedia, even when Y is english. (But heavens knows, for those who do read multiple languages, there's lots of low hanging fruit still left to add to any wikipedia, including the english one.)

1. Do we really NEED more articles on Botswana? Do the readers WANT more articles from there? I think the bigger issue is the youth bias. there are a lot of older readers of the Internet, but Wiki is youth-oriented in various ways (even the micro font, check out the ref 2.0 toolbar for the worst).

2. I think participation is very important. And I totally HEART having a decent edit user interface...it's a freaking CRIME that we are behind 1995 MS Word. Sooooo much time wasted for writers in the interface (even this edit window, look how tiny it is). And the lack of comprehension of how this impacts ergonomics reminds me of a bunch of Unix users, who think everyone should just enter C: prompts and why they heck would want want to click on stuff.  ;)

3. All that said, we should think about our work product and our READERS first. Yes, don't kill the golden goose. But the objective is NOT to have a well populated site. That is a means to an objective. Intead we should think about what our content is and how often it is used and not used and what criticisms are made of it. Although I'm not crazy about a bunch more Botswana content, I did appreciate that the foundation fellow was at least trying to talk about what sort of encyclopediea we should be (where our weak points are) on the output side.

TCO 20:45, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't know about Botswana, but my Ethiopia-related articles appear to be well received. The last two articles I created which made DYK achieved over 1,300 (Bakri Sapalo) & 1,400 (1960 Ethiopian coup attempt) views. A lot more people are interested in African topics than you might think.

I actually totally HEART an attitude of wanting to know what is going in around the world. We have a world of Starbux-zipping multiculturalists who have no concept what Burton did undercover. Oooh-rah! The world is strange and interesting and diverse...much more than the Wilsonian neoliberals think.