I uploaded on slideshare the presentation I gave time ago at Wikisym 2012. It is embedded below. There is a comparison of Points of View across different wikis (such as ecured.cu, the Cuban government official wiki, and Conservapedia, Anarchopedia, veganpedia, …) and a comparisons of the same page across different language Wikipedias thanks to Manypedia (such as “List of controversial issues” in English, Chinese and Catalan Wikipedia, “Human rights in the United States” in English and Chinese, “Osama Bin Laden” in English and Arabic, “Vietnam War” in English and Vietnamese, “Northern Cyprus” in Turkish, Greek and English Wikipedia, “Underwear” in English and Arabic)
As part of our investigation of the social side of Wikipedia in SoNet, Federico “fox” and I created Manypedia, a web mashup which I really like ;)
On Manypedia, you compare Linguistic Points Of View (LPOV) of different language Wikipedias. For example (but this is just one of the many possible comparisons), are you wondering if the community of editors in the English, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedias are crystallizing different histories of the Gaza War? Now you can check “Gaza War” page from English and Arabic Wikipedia (both translated into English) or from Hebrew Wikipedia (translated into English).
Manypedia, by using the Google Translate API, automatically translates the compared page in a language you don’t know into the language you know. And this is not limited to English as first language. For example you can search a page in the Italian Wikipedia (or in 56 languages Wikipedias) and compare it with the same page from the French Wikipedia but translated into Italian. In this way you can check the differences of the page from another language Wikipedia even if you don’t know that language, sweet!
Well, the Gaza War is just one of the topics which might have very different LPOVs on difference language Wikipedias but there are many more. As a starting point, you can check the Wikipedia page “List of controversial issues” which lists many controversial articles grouped around 15 main categories. Actually it is interesting to compare the controversial articles page on English and Chinese Wikipedia (the English Wikipedia is slightly more centered around topics important for US/Western culture and in particular the Chinese Wikipedia page reports pages such as “Anti-Japanese War”, “Nanjing Massacre”, “Taiwan”, “Human Rights in China”, “Falun Gong”, “Tiananmen Incident”, “Mao Zedong”, “List of sites blocked by China”) or on Catalan Wikipedia (in which controversiality arises around what is a country, Catalan countries and Valencia).
On top header of Manypedia there are some featured comparisons handpicked by us (and a random one is loaded on the main page) but actually you can search in real time for any page that appears in any language Wikipedia. Currently we support 56 languages so that for example, you can search for a page in the Arabic Wikipedia and compare it with the same page in Hebrew Wikipedia but translated into Arabic. Or from Italian compared with French, or from Tagalog compared with Catalan, or from Hindi compared with Irish, or from Turkish compared with Yiddish, or from Persian compared with Swahili … well, you’ve got the idea ;)
Of course if you have any suggestion or feedback, we would love to hear it in order to make Manypedia better and more useful.
You can contact us via Twitter (Manypedia@Twitter) or via Facebook (Manypedia@Facebook).
