Throw Your Hat in the Ring (of Wikipedia): Exploring Urban-Rural Disparities in Local Politicians' Information Supply

Abstract

In this era of digital politics, understanding the factors that influence the supply of political information is important. This study investigates the relationship between socio-economic status and the political information supplied on Wikipedia. To this end, it employs a dataset of politicians who ran for local elections in Japan over approximately 20 years and discovers that the creation and revisions of local politicians' pages are associated with socio-economic factors such as the employment ratio by industry and age distribution. We find that the majority of the suppliers of politicians' information are unregistered and primarily interested in politicians' pages compared to registered users. Additional analysis reveals that users who supply information about politicians before and after an election are more active on Wikipedia than the average user. The findings presented imply that the information supply on Wikipedia, which relies on voluntary contributions, may reflect regional socio-economic disparities.