Geographic Biases in OSM Contributions: How do the Geographic Extent of Contributions Differ among Demographic groups?

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is one of the most successful participatory mapping platforms for creating and editing geographic data. Despite being technically open and available to anyone to contribute, there is a significant demographic participation bias in the contributors of OSM, particularly from their spatial patterns on OSM. This study presents how geo-demographic biases of OSM contributions can be measured using the users’ ‘number of contributed countries’ and their ‘changesets’. We found that working-age male participants have a larger geographic extent of entries compared to their female counterparts. However, this once again varied significantly by the age groups. Both variables were employed as proxies to estimate the individual has a propensity to contribute locally or internationally. Future studies could add temporal aspects to compare the temporal patterns between demographic groups to give a multi-dimensional insight for VGI studies.