Sorry for forgetting to post last week. I haven’t kept up with this blog as much as I should be.

XKCD has a well-known comic showing how we too often overanalyze what are really just population density maps. It’s very easy to notice a pattern and extrapolate silly things from it. I recently saw another such example of this on social media I wanted to quickly bring up.

The implications of this map seems obvious, there were way more battles in Europe than anywhere else on earth. People on social media had all sorts of explanations:

Population density: battles mostly happen where people are, see the big stretch of emptiness in the Canadian Arctic, for instance. Europe has been densely populated for most of its history, so of course it had a lot of battles.

Recency bias: Europe fought 2 World Wars within the last century or so. As the largest wars in human history these of course had the most battles in human history, so there’s a lot of data points from that.

Warlike nature: maybe Europeans are just more warlike than the peaceful people in other parts of the world?

But the most obvious explanation seemed to be missing: Wikipedia is edited by the global online community, which is dominated by the the Anglosphere and Europe. Anglospheric and European editors will naturally gravitate towards writing many many articles about Europe and it’s history rather than the history of the world outside of Europe. A battle of 3000 people in the middle ages will have been studied by students in whatever country it happened in, even if it wasn’t important globally. And if that student was European or from the Anglosphere it’s more likely that they’ll grow up to be a Wikipedia editor and so add this unimportant battle into the encyclopedia.

So while there are some trends on this map that do come from the underlying data (ie there are way less battles in places where few people live), most of it is a function of bias. People write what they know. If there was an Indian version of Wikipedia instead, I’m certain the density of dots would be a lot higher there and a lot lower in Europe.