Manypedia: Comparing language points of view of Wikipedia communities

Abstract

The 4 million articles of the English Wikipedia have been written in a collaborative fashion by more than 16 million volunteer editors. On each article, the community of editors strive to reach a neutral point of view, representing all significant views fairly, proportionately, and without biases. However, beside the English one, there are more than 280 editions of Wikipedia in different languages and their relatively isolated communities of editors are not forced by the platform to discuss and negotiate their points of view. So the empirical question is: do communities on different language Wikipedias develop their own diverse Linguistic Points of View (LPOV)? To answer this question we created and released as open source Manypedia, a web tool whose aim is to facilitate cross-cultural analysis of Wikipedia language communities by providing an easy way to compare automatically translated versions of their different representations of the same topic.

Wikipedia access and contribution: Language choice in multilingual communities . A case study

“…The fact that, as stated above, the English Wikipedia has more articles and these tend to be longer, and arguably because English is commonly perceived as a universal language, affects the perception of this particular edition as being the best both in terms of reliability and coverage of topics. Despite this preference for English, there is no indication in our results that this is due to perceiving the smaller language editions to be more likely biased, as suggested by some literature (Pfeil et al, 2006;Massa and Scrinzi, 2013;Eom et al, 2015), but it rather seems to be related to the extension and completion in the more widely used language.…”

“…For a variety of reasons, there are significant differences in coverage, approaches and even internal policies among the different editions, which impact on how one can participate in the writing of articles. Additionally, there are the possible biases, which have been identified in the literature as being more likely to occur in smaller language communities, as it is expected that they would have a smaller group of people involved in the curation process (Pfeil et al, 2006;Massa and Scrinzi, 2013;Eom et al, 2015).…”

Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries

“…3b), shows that emphasis is given to the perspective of the police. The significant terms include: robbery, thieves, enforcement, gain access, removed and case 12 . On the other hand, the Wikipedia articles referring to this event focus more on the human interest and broader perspectives.…”

“…They find that when using the proposed interface, the researcher explore more diverse topics and formulate more specific research questions. ManyPedia [12] allows users to explore different points of view by showing two Wikipedia articles from different languages side-by-side. A similar approach was used to synchronize cross-lingual content [13] on Wikipedia.…”

“…3c shows the names of the owners and terms as cause, events, February strike, arrested and owner 13 . 12 In Dutch: overval, dieven, handhaving, toegang, verschaft, verwijderd, zaak. 13 In Dutch: aanleiding, gebeurtenissen, Februaristaking, gearresteerd, eigenaar.…”