How different cultures evaluate a person? Is an important person in one culture is also important in the other culture? We address these questions via ranking of multilingual Wikipedia articles. With three ranking algorithms based on network structure of Wikipedia, we assign ranking to all articles in 9 multilingual editions of Wikipedia and investigate general ranking structure of PageRank, CheiRank and 2DRank. In particular, we focus on articles related to persons, identify top 30 persons for each rank among different editions and analyze distinctions of their distributions over activity fields such as politics, art, science, religion, sport for each edition. We find that local heroes are dominant but also global heroes exist and create an effective network representing entanglement of cultures. The Google matrix analysis of network of cultures shows signs of the Zipf law distribution. This approach allows to examine diversity and shared characteristics of knowledge organization between cultures. The developed computational, data driven approach highlights cultural interconnections in a new perspective.
For many people, Wikipedia represents one of the primary sources of knowledge about foreign cultures. Yet, different Wikipedia language editions offer different descriptions of cultural practices. Unveiling diverging representations of cultures provides an important insight, since they may foster the formation of cross-cultural stereotypes, misunderstandings and potentially even conflict. In this work, we explore to what extent the descriptions of cultural practices in various European language editions of Wikipedia differ on the example of culinary practices and propose an approach to mine cu…
Wikipedia is a huge global repository of human knowledge, that can be leveraged to investigate interwinements between cultures. With this aim, we apply methods of Markov chains and Google matrix, for the analysis of the hyperlink networks of 24 Wikipedia language editions, and rank all their articles by PageRank, 2DRank and CheiRank algorithms. Using automatic extraction of people names, we obtain the top 100 historical figures, for each edition and for each algorithm. We investigate their spatial, temporal, and gender distributions in dependence of their cultural origins. Our study demonstrat…
It is arguable whether history is made by great men and women or vice versa, but undoubtably social connections shape history. Analysing Wikipedia, a global collective memory place, we aim to understand how social links are recorded across cultures. Starting with the set of biographies in the English Wikipedia we focus on the networks of links between these biographical articles on the 15 largest language Wikipedias. We detect the most central characters in these networks and point out culture-related peculiarities. Furthermore, we reveal remarkable similarities between distinct groups of lang…
Nowadays, information describing navigation behaviour of internet users are used in several fields, e-commerce, economy, sociology and data science. Such information can be extracted from different knowledge bases, including business-oriented ones. In this paper, we propose a new model for the PageRank, CheiRank and 2DRank algorithm based on the use of clickstream and pageviews data in the google matrix construction. We used data from Wikipedia and analysed links between over 20 million articles from 11 language editions. We extracted over 1.4 billion source-destination pairs of articles from …
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 geograph…
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford（牛津大学牛津互联网研究所）
This article analyzes one month of edits to Wikipedia in order to examine the role of users editing multiple language editions (referred to as multilingual users). Such multilingual users may serve an important function in diffusing information across different language editions of the encyclopedia, and prior work has suggested this could reduce the level of self-focus bias in each edition. This study finds multilingual users are much more active than their single-edition (monolingual) counterparts. They are found in all language editions, but smaller-sized editions with fewer users have a hig…
In this paper we study the differences in historical World View between Western and Eastern cultures, represented through the English, the Chinese, Japanese, and German Wikipedia. In particular, we analyze the historical networks of the World's leaders since the beginning of written history, comparing them in the different Wikipedias and assessing cultural chauvinism. We also identify the most influential female leaders of all times in the English, German, Spanish, and Portuguese Wikipedia. As an additional lens into the soul of a culture we compare top terms, sentiment, emotionality, and comp…
Multilingualism is common offline, but we have a more limited understanding of the ways multilingualism is displayed online and the roles that multilinguals play in the spread of content between speakers of different languages. We take a computational approach to studying multilingualism using one of the largest user-generated content platforms, Wikipedia. We study multilingualism by collecting and analyzing a large dataset of the content written by multilingual editors of the English, German, and Spanish editions of Wikipedia. This dataset contains over two million paragraphs edited by over 1…
In this paper we study the differences in historical worldview between Western and Eastern cultures, represented through the English, Chinese, Japanese, and German Wikipedia. In particular, we analyze the historical networks of the World's leaders since the beginning of written history, comparing them in the four different Wikipedias.
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford（牛津大学牛津互联网研究所）；Department of Theoretical Physics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯科技经济大学理论物理系）；School of Information and Communication, Rutgers University（罗格斯大学信息与传播学院）；Center for Network Science, Central European University（中欧大学网络科学中心）
We present, visualize and analyse the similarities and differences between the controversial topics related to "edit wars" identified in 10 different language versions of Wikipedia. After a brief review of the related work we describe the methods developed to locate, measure, and categorize the controversial topics in the different languages. Visualizations of the degree of overlap between the top 100 lists of most controversial articles in different languages and the content related to geographical locations will be presented. We discuss what the presented analysis and visualizations can tell…
Hyperlinks constitute the backbone of the Web; they enable user navigation, information discovery, content ranking, and many other crucial services on the Internet. In particular, hyperlinks found within Wikipedia allow the readers to navigate from one page to another to expand their knowledge on a given subject of interest or to discover a new one. However, despite Wikipedia editors' efforts to add and maintain its content, the distribution of links remains sparse in many language editions. This paper introduces a machine-in-the-loop entity linking system that can comply with community guidel…
Knowledge is useless without structure. While the classification of knowledge has been an enduring philosophical enterprise, it recently found applications in computer science, notably for artificial intelligence. The availability of large databases allowed for complex ontologies to be built automatically, for example by extracting structured content from Wikipedia. However, this approach is subject to manual categorization decisions made by online editors. Here we show that an implicit classification hierarchy emerges spontaneously on Wikipedia. We study the network of first links between art…
Wikipedia is the largest existing knowledge repository that is growing on a genuine crowdsourcing support. While the English Wikipedia is the most extensive and the most researched one with over five million articles, comparatively little is known about the behavior and growth of the remaining 283 smaller Wikipedias, the smallest of which, Afar, has only one article. Here we use a subset of this data, consisting of 14962 different articles, each of which exists in 26 different languages, from Arabic to Ukrainian. We study the growth of Wikipedias in these languages over a time span of 15 years…
This study concentrates on extracting painting art history knowledge from the network structure of Wikipedia. Therefore, we construct theoretical networks of webpages representing the hyper-linked structure of articles of 7 Wikipedia language editions. These 7 networks are analyzed to extract the most influential painters in each edition using Google matrix theory. Importance of webpages of over 3000 painters are measured using PageRank algorithm. The most influential painters are enlisted and their ties are studied with the reduced Google matrix analysis. Reduced Google Matrix is a powerful m…
As one of the Web's primary multilingual knowledge sources, Wikipedia is read by millions of people across the globe every day. Despite this global readership, little is known about why users read Wikipedia's various language editions. To bridge this gap, we conduct a comparative study by combining a large-scale survey of Wikipedia readers across 14 language editions with a log-based analysis of user activity. We proceed in three steps. First, we analyze the survey results to compare the prevalence of Wikipedia use cases across languages, discovering commonalities, but also substantial differe…
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford（牛津大学牛津互联网研究所）
This article analyzes users who edit Wikipedia articles about Okinawa, Japan, in English and Japanese. It finds these users are among the most active and dedicated users in their primary languages, where they make many large, high-quality edits. However, when these users edit in their non-primary languages, they tend to make edits of a different type that are overall smaller in size and more often restricted to the narrow set of articles that exist in both languages. Design changes to motivate wider contributions from users in their non-primary languages and to encourage multilingual users to …
