Several scholars have shown that educational quality, particularly for specific domains and within young age cohorts, is a strong predictor for both future economic growth and processes of democratization. However, measuring educational quality, as done in standardized evaluation such as the OECD’s PISA score, is a cost- and labour-intensive process. The process is even more compli- cated if specific fields of knowledge are regarded. At the same time, subnational distributions of educational quality are neglected.

We propose an alternative approximation of education quality. Via monitoring Wikipedia article edits a real-time and regional measure of knowledge diffusion can be created.

In combination, the retrieved information allows to measure knowledge diffusion by region and encyclopedic category. As a new and refined approximation of educational quality, the regional knowledge diffusion measure can help to track educational developments in real-time and with a specific content-related focus. It ultimately can help to improve forecasts of democratization and economic development processes.