Linguistic neighbourhoods: explaining cultural borders on Wikipedia through multilingual co-editing activity

Abstract

In this paper, we study the network of global interconnections between language communities, based on shared co-editing interests of Wikipedia editors, and show that although English is discussed as a potential lingua franca of the digital space, its domination disappears in the network of co-editing similarities, and instead local connections come to the forefront. Out of the hypotheses we explored, bilingualism, linguistic similarity of languages, and shared religion provide the best explanations for the similarity of interests between cultural communities. Population attraction and geographical proximity are also significant, but much weaker factors bringing communities together. In addition, we present an approach that allows for extracting significant cultural borders from editing activity of Wikipedia users, and comparing a set of hypotheses about the social mechanisms generating these borders. Our study sheds light on how culture is reflected in the collective process of archiving knowledge on Wikipedia, and demonstrates that cross-lingual interconnections on Wikipedia are not dominated by one powerful language. Our findings also raise some important policy questions for the Wikimedia Foundation.

Indicators of Country Similarity in Terms of Music Taste, Cultural, and Socio-economic Factors

“…To gauge similarity in terms of cultural and socio-economic dimensions, we calculate the Euclidean distance between the respective scores given by Hofstede and QoG data. We further add as another aspect the geographical distance between countries, which is computed as the geodesic distance in kilometers between country capitals [19].…”

Semi-automatic generation of a corpus of Wikipedia articles on science and technology

“…Unfortunately, this is different in languages other than Spanish, where these pages may not exist. This is a perfect example of the different levels of development that can be found in Wikipedia (Halavais;Lackaff, 2008;Jiménez-Pelayo, 2009;Samoilenko et al, 2016), as content is created according to users' interests, with little coordination.…”

“…More than 28 million people have contributed to Wikipedia, and more than 116,000 can be considered active users, meaning they have edited content during the last month. It is, therefore, the biggest multilingual collaborative effort ever made (Samoilenko et al, 2016). In the particular case of the Spanish language edition of Wikipedia, it has more than 1.2 million articles and is the 9 th largest, with more than 15,000 active users in 2017.…”

Robust clustering of languages across Wikipedia growth

“…The study also concluded that language remains a formidable hurdle to the spread of content. Similarly, in [48], cultural borders on Wikipedia through multilingual co-editing activity have been studied, showing that the domination of the English language disappears in the network of co-editing similarities, and that instead local connections come to the forefront. An approach has also been proposed there that allows the extraction of significant cultural borders based on the editing activity of Wikipedia users.…”