Through the magic of StackExchange Data Explorer, we came up with interesting facts about the distribution of TeX.sx users around the world. Of course, this is just an overview, mainly because we cannot ensure that everybody’s location is correct.
We did a semi-automatic process of location retrieval. Data was parsed, cleaned and then tabulated. It’s worth mentioning that the data refers to 48% of our users – only users who effectively wrote a valid location address were considered.
For this experiment, we considered a data dump made in September. Stefan pointed out that a new data dump is available, so values might change substantially for the current state.
Check it out the results, sorted alphabetically. From Argentina to Colombia:
From Costa Rica to Guatemala:
From Hong Kong to Lithuania:
From Luxembourg to Peru:
From Philippines to South Korea:
From Spain to Vietnam:
The top ten countries in number of users:
Update: Jake provided a fantastic map with detailed locations. Thanks a million!
Please, help us on improving the users data! Provide a correct location in your profile, we want to know you. And for the newcomers, welcome to TeX.sx, the worldwide community for users of TeX, LaTeX, ConTeXt, and related typesetting systems!
Bonus: we also have some odd locations:
-
\location{address}
-
129.21.0.0/16
- 6
- 17837
- asdf
- Banana Republic
- Chandgad, India
- Depends
- Duchy of Grand Fenwick
- Here
- Hilbert’s Hotel
- Mount Never-Rest
- Old abandoned house
- Probably skiing
- On the server farm
- Somewhere in the vicinity of Sol
- Trapped in an IO monad, send help (This one made me laugh a lot. Ah, the joy of being a Haskell user.)
- World
- Your worst nightmare (I was parsing the data late in the night. When I read it, I looked around just to be sure.)
There’s an interesting thread in our meta site about how can we explore the content of TeX.sx through Data Explorer. Check out the available queries and also come up with your own!
Haha, “Hilbert’s Hotel”, I’m pretty sure they have a room for me, too 8-D
They surely have! The only drawback is having to move the guests. 🙂 It was quite a surprise when I found this location. 🙂
Such a lovely place. You can check out any time but you can never leave…
i think the duchy of grand fenwick is somewhere in the vicinity of the principality of san seriffe.
haha Grand Fenwick probably borders on San Serriffe (curiously, no one has chosen San Serriffe for location). 🙂
Excellent post!
I’ve taken the liberty to create a map that shows the (reported) location of the users with a bit more detail. I’ve used R to query the Google geocoding service for the coordinates of the reported locations, which worked surprisingly well. You can find the zoomable map at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3113270/TeX-SX-users.swf. It uses the backspace.com DIY map
The results here are quire surprising. Based on the response rates and postings of new questions depending on the time of day, my impression was that most of the users were in the European time zones. Adding up the numbers for the top 10 countries listed shows that there are slightly more users in US/Canada than Europe. I am assuming that that the results here includes all registered users — would be interesting to see what the results are if take a ratio of user/answer, or user/question for the each country. Also would be interesting to filter out those that have no had any activity over the last 6 months, or even just count those that have rep greater than some number.
Great idea! We’ll try to extract more info from the DB. 🙂
Thanks for sharing your thoughts about actually dating.
Regards