Migration of Small and Endangered Languages into the Wikipedia

Abstract

This paper reviews the Wikipedias for the smallest languages it is available for. We compute the most frequent shared articles (by automatically extracting their translation links), categories and other features. By analysing these data and aligning it tentatively with the literature, it is aimed at an understanding what interests could connect endangered languages. Which needs towards an emerging digital infrastructure could these results point to, is what the discussion is concerned with besides the crucial question of representativity of this data for small and endangered languages.

Disappearing without a Trace: Coverage, Community, Quality, and Temporal Dynamics of Wikipedia Articles on Endangered Brazilian Indigenous Languages

“…Those studies have provided insights into issues such as automatically assessing article quality (Dalip et al 2009;Shen, Qi, and Baldwin 2017), analyzing citations (Piccardi et al 2020;Baigutanova et al 2023), images (He et al 2018;Rama et al 2022), andinfo-boxes (Graells-Garrido, Lalmas, andMenczer 2015;Lewoniewski 2017) or understanding readers' preferences (Lehmann et al 2014). Other works focused on identifying underrepresented groups (Graells-Garrido, Lalmas, and Menczer 2015;Mandiberg 2023;Gallert et al 2016;Sethuraman, Grinter, and Zegura 2020;Hoenen and Rahn 2021) and the asymmetry of the coverage across different language versions (Hale 2015;Graham 2011;Lemmerich et al 2019;Roy, Bhatia, and Jain 2020;Ashrafimoghari 2023). In this paper, we focus on these two areas.…”

“…Roy, Bhatia, and Jain (2020) found important details missing on non-English versions of Wikipedia, even in the largest one (English). Hoenen and Rahn (2021) analyzed 45 small Wikipedias and found common article categories like geolocations, animals, plants, and famous people. (Callahan and Herring 2011) compared articles about American and Polish celebrities, finding that English articles are usually longer with more references and links while Polish articles focus more on personal and professional accomplishments.…”

“…The third list used in this study was provided by the Ethnologue Language of the World (Ethnologue 2022). Ethnologue is an annual publication which catalogs over 7,000 languages spoken in more than 200 countries and widely used by linguists (Hoenen and Rahn 2021). The UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages report (UNESCO 2010) also uses data from Ethnologue publications.…”