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Michael Falk

Michael Falk

Amateur radio operator (AA9RK) and junior high school math teacher from West Allis, Wisconsin; volunteer examiner and active member of West Allis Radio Amateur Club and Milwaukee Repeater Club

Sep 3, 2026

History Lab

History Lab

55. Australia and Wikipedia: the bias in the map, from All That We Touch

Sep 3 · 37m

Francesca Sidoti
Francesca SidotiHOST
6:17
Could you describe that map to us?
Michael Falk
Michael FalkGUEST
6:20
So you can see there are some very brightly coloured parts along the east coast and down in the southwest corner.
Michael Falk
Michael FalkGUEST
6:28
And then some dark or even just blank parts across most of the continent.
Michael Falk
Michael FalkGUEST
6:37
And one of the big pictures that emerges from that is that some parts of Australia are extremely written about on Wikipedia.
Michael Falk
Michael FalkGUEST
6:45
They're kind of obvious places like Sydney and Melbourne, whereas vast swathes of the continent are only described by a small number of articles, which are often very short.
Michael Falk
Michael FalkGUEST
6:56
Can we see any other patterns that emerge? So one thing we tried was looking at the number of times there are edits on each place.
Michael Falk
Michael FalkGUEST
7:04
And this only accentuated the pattern we'd seen.
Francesca Sidoti
Francesca SidotiHOST
7:07
What's the story? Like what is going on when you look at those maps and listeners can get these maps from the show notes and the Wikihistories website? What do you take from it?

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