Wikipedia s coverage of Manchester is notably better than comparable cities like Birmingham or Glasgow My theory would be that the presence of UMIST gave Manchester a head start in the early days when it came to people with the perfect combination of tech savvy articulate knowledgeable and socially inept enough to have large amounts of time to dedicate to what was a poor quality experimental website but socially aware enough to play the strange behind the scenes backstabbing game that was early Wiki politics once these people had built a hard core of articles people looking up their hometown later on weren t put off Wikipedia by the poor quality of what s generally the first Wikipedia article people see The US has a similar hotspot in Chicago built up by TonyTheTiger and Kelly Martin scent