That equation is more complex than it might initially look. Consider broadband access: Internet capacity, or bandwidth, is growing rapidly in Africa, Wales pointed out. Yet most of those who are coming online for the first time are doing so on mobile devices, which you can easily use to, say, make a spelling correction on a Wikipedia page, but not to contribute four paragraphs of text with 18 footnotes. These trends hold in many developing countries, as the graph below from the International Telecommunication Union makes clear (mobile broadband penetration rates are in light blue; “fixed,” or non-mobile, broadband rates are in gray).

Global Internet and Cellular Penetration Rates

The number of speakers of a language is also an imperfect indicator for the size of a given Wikipedia edition. “One of the things that really motivates people to write [for Wikipedia] is the existence of readers,” Wales said. There are nearly 70 million Tamil speakers in the world, for instance, but getting them to contribute to Wikipedia in Tamil depends on how widespread internet access is among Tamil speakers and how high the demand is for information in that language rather than English.

Censorship, moreover, can render all these other variables irrelevant. Wales told me that the Chinese government is presently blocking Wikipedia in its entirety, in part because of the encyclopedia’s recent move to an encrypted “HTTPS” protocol that makes it harder for the government to determine what people are reading and to selectively filter sensitive pages, as Chinese censors had done in the past.

“Part of the reason why Wikipedia is not the immediate kind of thing that people want to block is it’s not a wide-open free-speech message board and people aren’t getting on Wikipedia to plan a protest at a certain date, at a certain time,” Wales said. “Even our discussion pages are about how to improve the article, not for your general opinion of Barack Obama.”

Still, Wikipedia has flickered in and out of the Chinese internet over the years, and in December Wales traveled to China to meet with government officials. What’s his pitch to Chinese authorities? “An argument that doesn’t really work very well is to sound like some kind of crazy American talking about the First Amendment. They just don’t care,” Wales said. He argues that access to knowledge is a human right, but he doesn’t dwell on that point. “The main [argument to the Chinese] is that Wikipedia is incredibly useful for economic growth, they do care about that, for education, they do care about that. For people in technology, for example, if you ask any programmer, ‘How do you keep up to date with new technology? How do you hear about some new programming language?’ They go to Wikipedia.”

These obstacles to Wikipedia’s geographic expansion complicate the widespread view that the democratization of internet access will necessarily democratize the production, exchange, and consumption of information. Don Tapscott, the co-author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, articulated one version of this view when he compared the significance of the internet to that of the printing press: “The printing press gave us access to recorded knowledge. The internet gives us access not just to knowledge but to the intelligence contained in people’s crania, access to the intelligence of people on a global basis. This is not an information age. It’s an age of communication, of collective intelligence, of major collaboration, of major participation.”