Not at Home on the Range

TLDR

Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap are critical sources of geographic knowledge for humans and intelligent technologies. The study explores the effectiveness of peer production across the rural/urban divide and codifies systemic challenges in representing rural phenomena. The authors analyze peer‑produced content from Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap, coding for quality, contributor focus, and bot involvement, and propose potential solutions. Peer‑produced content about rural areas on Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap is systematically lower quality, less locally authored, and more bot‑generated.

Abstract

Wikipedia articles about places, OpenStreetMap features, and other forms of peer-produced content have become critical sources of geographic knowledge for humans and intelligent technologies. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of the peer production model across the rural/urban divide, a divide that has been shown to be an important factor in many online social systems. We find that in both Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap, peer-produced content about rural areas is of systematically lower quality, is less likely to have been produced by contributors who focus on the local area, and is more likely to have been generated by automated software agents (i.e. "bots"). We then codify the systemic challenges inherent to characterizing rural phenomena through peer production and discuss potential solutions.