Populations preferences trough Wikipedia edits: A dynamic analysis
Yerali Gandica, Laura Hernandez
Although Wikipedia (WP) is available in 291 languages, the amount of content covered by different languages differs significantly. Even though there is no central authority who dictates which topics should be covered, one of the challenges for Wikipedia, in the last decade, has been to balance the coverage of content across its different languages. For this purpose, a recommendation system is applied by the Wikimedia Foundation in order to encourage Wikipedians to fill that gap.
However, contributing to Wikipedia means more than writing encyclopedic contents. Indeed, it allows communities to store cultural memories of events, to show reality through their own lens and to document their prominent people and places. In this sense, even though we understand the inconvenience of the imbalance between the information among several languages, we hypothesize that this genuine gap has some important implications. It represents legitimate preferences among individuals sharing the same language, which is a footprint of the whole group's collective identity.
In [1] we analyzed the broad preferences by the population who is editing Wikipedia, depicted by categories over several worldwide languages. Our study covered twelve Wikipedias: the ones written in English (EN-WP), Spanish (ES-WP), French (FR-WP), Portuguese (PT-WP), Italian (IT-WP), Hungarian (HU-WP), German (DE-WP), Russian (RU-WP), Arabic (AR-WP), Japanese (JA-WP), Chinese (ZH-WP) and Vietnamese (VI-WP). The selection was done based on the interplay between a worldwide view and the WP sizes. Some of the interesting results reported in that piece of works where the unexpected diversity on the Italian Wikipedia, compared with the English one, which is worldwide written. On the other side, the German Wikipedia presents specific topics of interest. Another unexpected result is in the high number of pages in
the French Wikipedia.
We also showed the distributions for the number of edits, pages and editors depicted by categories. However, how was the dynamic for those results? Are all the subjects continuously increasing or mostly depending on external events? Those are the questions that we plan to discuss on this oral communication. Our results show general characteristics, with some variations related to different languages.
References
[1] Populations preferences trough Wikipedia edits. Yérali Gandica.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8554724. 2018 Fifth International Conference on
Social Networks Analysis, Management and Security (SNAMS)← Schedule