The curious case of .cat, the Internet’s weirdest, most radical domain

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/05/13/the-curious-case-of-cat-the-internets-weirdest-most-radical-domain/

by kiliancs • 11 years ago

4 1 11 years ago

washingtonpost.com

erroneousfunk• 11 years ago

A few years ago, I did a web scraping project, involving scraping edit times and locations (based on IP addresses) for a variety of different languages on Wikipedia. This worked out really well -- it was interesting to see when people were awake, editing Wikipedia throughout the world, and where in the world the languages were generally spoken.

The problems came with Catalan. Although, like the article points out, they have a fairly large presence on Wikipedia, almost no one is logged out when they make article edits (only users who don't have an account when they make edits are associated with an IP address, which is the data I was looking for). So the language was "large" enough to be statistically relevant for the purposes of my scraper, unfortunately, there were relatively few data points I could get. Unlike the other languages, its Wikipedia pages seemed to be propped up by the work of a few dedicated accounts who were always logged in, rather than the more organic collection of people who were moseying by and happened to want to edit a page somewhat spontaneously. It's like casual browsers weren't actually using, or at least editing, the Catalan Wikipedia.

Take that as you will.

The curious case of .cat, the Internet’s weirdest, most radical domain

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