research-article

In search of the ur-Wikipedia: universality, similarity, and translation in the Wikipedia inter-language link network

Authors:

Morten Warncke-Wang,

Anuradha Uduwage,

John RiedlAuthors Info & Claims

WikiSym '12: Proceedings of the Eighth Annual International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration

Article No.: 20, Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/2462932.2462959

Published: 27 August 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Wikipedia has become one of the primary encyclopaedic information repositories on the World Wide Web. It started in 2001 with a single edition in the English language and has since expanded to more than 20 million articles in 283 languages. Criss-crossing between the Wikipedias is an inter-language link network, connecting the articles of one edition of Wikipedia to another. We describe characteristics of articles covered by nearly all Wikipedias and those covered by only a single language edition, we use the network to understand how we can judge the similarity between Wikipedias based on concept coverage, and we investigate the flow of translation between a selection of the larger Wikipedias. Our findings indicate that the relationships between Wikipedia editions follow Tobler's first law of geography: similarity decreases with increasing distance. The number of articles in a Wikipedia edition is found to be the strongest predictor of similarity, while language similarity also appears to have an influence. The English Wikipedia edition is by far the primary source of translations. We discuss the impact of these results for Wikipedia as well as user-generated content communities in general.

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Cited By

Warncke-Wang MHo RMiller MJohnson I(2023)Increasing Participation in Peer Production Communities with the Newcomer HomepageProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100717:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610071
Miquel-Ribé MLaniado D(2021)The Wikipedia Diversity Observatory: helping communities to bridge content gaps through interactive interfacesJournal of Internet Services and Applications10.1186/s13174-021-00141-y12:1Online publication date: 1-Nov-2021
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13174-021-00141-y
Mehler AHemati WWelke PKonca MUslu T(2020)Multiple Texts as a Limiting Factor in Online Learning: Quantifying (Dis-)similarities of Knowledge NetworksFrontiers in Education10.3389/feduc.2020.5626705Online publication date: 3-Nov-2020
https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2020.562670
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In search of the ur-Wikipedia: universality, similarity, and translation in the Wikipedia inter-language link network

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cover image ACM Conferences

WikiSym '12: Proceedings of the Eighth Annual International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration

August 2012

295 pages

ISBN:9781450316057

DOI:10.1145/2462932

General Chair:
Cliff Lampe
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGWEB: ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web
TJEF: The John Ernest Foundation

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 27 August 2012

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WikiSym '12: The 8th International Symposium on Wikis

August 27 - 29, 2012

Linz, Austria

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WikiSym '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 21 of 37 submissions, 57%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 69 of 145 submissions, 48%

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Cited By

Warncke-Wang MHo RMiller MJohnson I(2023)Increasing Participation in Peer Production Communities with the Newcomer HomepageProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100717:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610071
Miquel-Ribé MLaniado D(2021)The Wikipedia Diversity Observatory: helping communities to bridge content gaps through interactive interfacesJournal of Internet Services and Applications10.1186/s13174-021-00141-y12:1Online publication date: 1-Nov-2021
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13174-021-00141-y
Mehler AHemati WWelke PKonca MUslu T(2020)Multiple Texts as a Limiting Factor in Online Learning: Quantifying (Dis-)similarities of Knowledge NetworksFrontiers in Education10.3389/feduc.2020.5626705Online publication date: 3-Nov-2020
https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2020.562670
Miquel-Ribé MLaniado DRobles GStol KWang X(2020)The Wikipedia Diversity ObservatoryProceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Open Collaboration10.1145/3412569.3412866(1-4)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3412569.3412866
Góngora-Goloubintseff J(2020)The Falklands/Malvinas war taken to the Wikipedia realm: a multimodal discourse analysis of cross-lingual violations of the Neutral Point of ViewPalgrave Communications10.1057/s41599-020-0435-26:1Online publication date: 7-Apr-2020
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0435-2
Mamadouh V(2019)Wikipedia: Mirror, Microcosm, and Motor of Global Linguistic DiversityHandbook of the Changing World Language Map10.1007/978-3-319-73400-2_200-1(1-27)Online publication date: 15-May-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73400-2_200-1
Mamadouh V(2019)Wikipedia: Mirror, Microcosm, and Motor of Global Linguistic DiversityHandbook of the Changing World Language Map10.1007/978-3-030-02438-3_200(3773-3799)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2019
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Miquel-Ribé MLaniado D(2018)Wikipedia Culture Gap: Quantifying Content Imbalances Across 40 Language EditionsFrontiers in Physics10.3389/fphy.2018.000546Online publication date: 6-Jun-2018
https://doi.org/10.3389/fphy.2018.00054
Zhu HYu BHalfaker ATerveen L(2018)Value-Sensitive Algorithm DesignProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/32744632:CSCW(1-23)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2018
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Kim SPark SHale SKim SByun JOh A(2016)Understanding Editing Behaviors in Multilingual WikipediaPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.015530511:5(e0155305)Online publication date: 12-May-2016
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