The United States Ranked by the Length of Their Wikipedia Articles

The Data Is Beautiful Subreddit has long been a favorite stomping ground of the staff here at The Chartistry. In fact, it was beautiful data visualizations that I was introduced to there that first ignited my love for charts. As you might have guessed, today’s visualization comes from this very place. Unlike most visualizations we feature here, this one proves that a good visualization doesn’t need to be beautiful; sometimes they just need to be functional.

Reddit user Gullyn1 has created a simple map that reveals the United States by the length of their Wikipedia articles. You can find the original Reddit post here. Gullyn1 explains in a comment that they used Wikipedia’s API and Python to create the map.

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At a glance, it appears that New York and California are the clear front runners. It’s unclear why some articles are longer than others but if I had to guess, I’d wager that it’s the states with the most history and those that have had the most notable events (both positive and negative). According to the raw data, California is the longest at 5,810,441 bytes for its main and sub-articles and New York comes in as a close second place with 5,655,709 bytes.

“This is great and all, but isn’t this map just showing a trend that the states with the highest populations also have the longest Wikipedia articles?” You might be right! That’s why I was especially happy to see that Gullyn1 created an additional map that adjusts for population. See it here:

The United States Ranked by The Length of Their Wikipedia Articles Per Capita (in Bytes)

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When you look at the data like this, interesting and more meaningful trends begin to emerge. After adjusting for population, Montana, North and South Dakota, Vermont, Rhode Island, Alaska, and Hawaii are the new front runners.