Tag Archives: Wikipedia

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Cross-cultural studies of Wikipedia

Papers I’m aware of that compare different Wikipedias. Do you know of other investigations comparing Wikipedias?

“Cultural Differences in Collaborative Authoring of Wikipedia” [1] compared French, German, Japanese and Duch Wikipedia. They used content analysis methods on just the page “Game” from the different Wikipedias, i.e just 4 pages. Authors find some correlations between patterns of contributions (number of deleting actions, of adding actions, of corrective actions) and the four dimensions of cultural influences proposed by Hofstede (Power Distance, Collectivism versus Individualism, Femininity versus Masculinity, and Uncertainty Avoidance). They conclude thatcultural differences that are observed in the physical world also exist in the virtual world.
“Cross-cultural analysis of the Wikipedia community” [2] analyzed English, Hebrew, Japanese, and Malay. They used content analysis of 120 Wikipedia talk pages (randomly sampled among “user talk pages”, “article talk pages”, and “Wikipedia policies talk pages”) in 4 language Wikipedias that differ in size and culture: English (western, big), Hebrew (western, small), Japanese (eastern, big) and Malay (eastern, small). Authors find that “Courtesy” postings were more frequent in large than in small Wikipedias, and in Eastern than in Western (significant). This is probably connected to Hofstede’s high vs low power distance, because high politeness is associated with high power distance. Plus, in collectivistics/high power distance cultures relationships prevail over tasks. Other correlations were not significant.
“Issues of cross-contextual information quality evaluation — The case of Arabic, English, and Korean Wikipedia” [3] compared Arabic, English, and Korean Wikipedias. Authors used many different methods, including content analysis of featured articles and count of number of Internal Links, of edits, of Adjacent Pages, of Registered Users, … and applied multivariate statistical analysis in order to find correlations. Hofstede’s cultural dimension scores for the United States, South Korea and the Arab World were also used to assess pair-wise similarity of the Wikipedias at the cultural level. They conclude that different Wikipedia communities may have different models for quality.

“Conflictual Consensus in the Chinese Version of Wikipedia” [4] focuses on one single Wikipedia, the Chinese one, and compares point of regional differences of its contributors based on four regions of origin (Mainland, Hong Kong / Macau, Taiwan, and Singapore / Malaysia). Authors claim that the main issue threatening the potential growth of Chinese Wikipedia are not the internal conflicts, nor the external competition by Baidu Baike but the evolution of the newly established “Avoid Region-Centric Policy”.

“Analyzing Cultural Differences in Collaborative Innovation Networks by Analyzing Editing Behavior in Different-Language Wikipedias” [5] does not use manual content analysis but social network analysis as a lens for comparing English, German, Japanese, Korean, and Finish language Wikipedias finding a difference between egalitarian cultures such as the Finnish, and quite hierarchical ones such as the Japanese.

References

[1] Pfeil, U., Zaphiris, P. and Ang, C. S. 2006. Cultural Differences in Collaborative Authoring of Wikipedia. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12, 88–113.

[2] Hara, N., Shachaf, P., & Hew, K.F. 2010. Cross-cultural analysis of the Wikipedia community. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(10), 2097–2108.

[3] Stvilia, B., Al-Faraj, A., & Yi, Y. 2009. Issues of cross- contextual information quality evaluation—The case of Arabic, English, and Korean Wikipedias. Library & Information Science Research, 31(4), 232-239.

[4] Liao, H. 2009. Conflictual Consensus in the Chinese Version of Wikipedia. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.

[5] Nemoto, K. Gloor, P. 2010. Analyzing Cultural Differences in Collaborative Innovation Networks by Analyzing Editing Behavior in Different-Language Wikipedias. Proceedings of COINs 2010, Collaborative Innovations Networks Conference, Savannah GA, Oct 7-9, 2010

Diderot on the Encyclopédie

List of largest Wikis

Paper “Wikipedia research and tools: Review and comments”

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The draft paper “Wikipedia research and tools: Review and comments” by Finn Arup Nielsen (dated March 17, 2011) is a very useful 56-pages resource highlighting key areas of research for Wikipedia (with citations to relevant work already published). The key areas identified are in the following. The cited papers (with annotations!) are 236! Even if this is draft paper, it is a super valuable resource! Check the pdf file.

Identified key research areas. Quality, Factual errors, Coverage and bias, Actuality, Sources, Accessibility, Size across languages, Network analysis, matrix factorizations and other operations, Genre, Article feedback, Vandalism reversion, Biased editing, Use of Wikipedia in court, User contributions, User characteristics, Organization, Popularity, Why do people edit?, Why do people leave?, Why does it work?, Serving content, Using categories, Thesaurus construction, Translation, Trend spotting and prediction, Searching with Wikipedia, Databasing the structured content, Geography, Extending Wikipedia, Quality assessment, certification and rating, Automatic creation of content, Tables and databases, Semantic wikis, Form-based editing, Markup, Extended Authoring, Geographical extension, Extending browsing, Graphic extensions, Video extensions, Real-time editing, Distributed and disconnected Wikipedia, Wiki and programming, Using Wikipedia and other wikis in research and education, Attitude towards Wikipedia, Use of Wikipedia, Citing Wikipedia, Special wikis, Censorship, Carl Hewitt vs. Wikipedia, Wikipedia and wikis as a teach- project, Wikiversity, serves the purpose of building a ressource for teaching and learning tool, Using wikis for course communication, Textbooks, Future.

Abstract: I here give an overview of Wikipedia and wiki research and tools. Well over 1,000 reports have been published in the field and there exist dedicated scientific meetings for Wikipedia research. It is not possible to give a complete review of all material published. This overview serves to describe some key areas of research.

Credits: Image by XKCD released under a Creative Commons Attribution~~-NonCommercial~~ 2.5 License.

Video of evolution in time of the Wikipedia page about London bombings

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History unfolding from phauly on Vimeo.

7 July 2005
08.50 London is struck by three bombs.
09.18 (just 28 minutes later) on Wikipedia, the user Morwen creates the page “7 July 2005 London bombings”.
10.38 76 different Wikipedians made 250 edits to this page already, trying to make sense of reality in realtime …
By the end of the day the Wikipedia page “7 July 2005 London bombings” have been edited 2581 times!

The video “History unfolding” shows the evolution in time of the Wikipedia page “7 July 2005 London bombings”. Technically, I extracted from the API all the revisions of the Wikipedia page and I got a screenshot of each of them using Firefox with Page Saver extension running on an X virtual framebuffer (I tried khtml2png but I was unable to install it). Then I put together all the screenshots with mencoder and added the audio.
Wikipedia pages are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. The soundtrack I added is Unfinished History by Johaness Gilther, released on Jamendo as Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs. So my video is released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Enjoy!

The video is just one example of history unfolding under your eyes as it develops, of how people create their collective memories in real time.
We can now investigate how we, as a society, create our world, our perceptions of the past.
Now we can research past, present and future! And control it together!

“Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past.”
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell

Wikipedia mentioned in books in 1975

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UPDATE: Dami, in a comment to this post, says “if a word appears in a newer edition of an older work (e.g. in the introduction section of cheap reprints of public domain books) Google will count it as an appearance at the time the original work was published.” I checked and this is true, thanks Dami!

I was playing with Google Books Ngram Viewer, which allows you to check how frequently certain phrases occurred in books published since 1950 up to 2008.
Curiously the following graph reports that some books (only 0.0000011% but greater than zero anyway!) were containing the work “wikipedia” (and “wiki”) already in 1950 and in 1975. Maybe there is a small bug even in mighty google services?

The following graph instead shows the increase (as expected) of mentions to “wikipedia” and “wiki” in books since 2003.

Percentage of men and women on different social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, …)

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Lots of debate arose around the fact almost 87% of Wikipedia editors are male. This is not necessarily true since the survey on which this “fact” is based has some biases (for example, people self-elected to answer).
However, a query run on the Wikipedia database showed that more than 83% self-identified as male.
While these numbers are not 100% representative of reality, it is probably true that most of editors are male. This is acknowledged also on a Wikipedia page about the systemic bias of Wikipedia (yes, I know this very page has been written by people whose bias we are trying to interpret but, going to the extremes, it’s turtles all the way down ;)

So the question could be: what is the ratio male/female on other social networking sites?

Just, for comparative reasons (and a bit for fun too), I compiled the following table based on the Social Network Analysis Report by Ignite Social Media. The table is sorted so that first lines are sites in which there are relatively more females than males. I’m not familiar with all the sites but it seems that sites more populated by women are the very social and playful (such as Haboo, Bebo, Myspace, Xanga, Facebook). On the other side of the spectrum there are sites populated most by males: sites showing what’s interesting right now thanks to social bookmarking such as Reddit, Digg, Identi.ca, and “professional” network sites such as Linkedin and Plaxo.
This table is not “scientific” in any way as well (for instance, percentages in the report are gathered from Google Ad Planner and Google Insights for Search).
Consider the following table just as more food for thought. Does it confirm your intuitions? Or should I say prejudices? ;)

	Social network site	Percentage of females
	Habbo	66%
	Bebo	62%
	Myspace	62%
	Xanga	62%
	Facebook	55%
	Ning	55%
	Hi5	52%
	Meetup	52%
	Tribe	52%
	Twitter	52%
	Yelp	52%
	Flixster	50%
	Foursquare	50%
	Friendster	50%
	Flickr	48%
	Last.fm	48%
	Livejournal	48%
	Metafilter	48%
	Multiply	48%
	Plaxo	45%
	Stumbleupon	45%
	Badoo	43%
	Mixx	43%
	Linkedin	40%
	Netlog	40%
	Newsvine	40%
	Plurk	40%
	Identi.ca	34%
	Digg	32%
	Indianpad	24%
	Reddit	24%

Credits: Icons by socialshift, elegantthemes and WpZoom.

Percentage of men and women on different Wikipedias

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Few days ago there was an interesting article on NYTimes about the small percentage of women on Wikipedia.
Today on the gendergap mailing list at wikipedia there is a very interesting ongoing discussion. Some preliminary statistics from the discussion are:

Wikipedia in specific language	Number of users who specified gender in preferences	Percentage of users who specified gender in preferences	How many men	How many women	Percentage of women
English http://en.wikipedia.org	13959842	2.01%	233312	46973	16.76%
German http://de.wikipedia.org	1167708	3.47%	35726	4800	11.84%
French http://fr.wikipedia.org	998668	2.16%	18556	3054	14.13%
Serbian http://sr.wikipedia.org	78180	2.66%	1666	414	19.90%
Russian http://ru.wikipedia.org	620393	16.80%	80491	23750	22.78%
Polish http://pl.wikipedia.org	414511	3.64%	12106	2999	19.85%
Dutch http://nl.wikipedia.org	368815	2.92%	8977	1781	16.56%
Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org	1464442	2.26%	27980	5070	15.34%

Interesting to note how on Russian Wikipedia, users tend to express their gender much more (16.80%!). Do you have ideas if (1) this is a cultural issue specific of Russians, (2) it depends on the practices of the specific Wikipedia in Russian or (3) it depends on the user interface, for example it might be that when you register you are redirect to an HTML page in which you can specify also your gender?
Also interesting is the fact that in this Wikipedia the percentage of women is the highest (22.78%). Probably the reason is that in a place in which gender is more represented, it is more normal for women to represent it as well. While where gender it is not represent, it is in general foolish for women to explicitly say “Hey, I’m female!” in order not to attract (additional) unwanted messages. Or put in other terms, OMG Girlz Don’t Exist on teh Intarweb!!!!1.

OMG Girlz Don't Exist on teh Intarweb!!!!1

View more presentations from Paolo Massa.

Img by nojhan, under Creative Commons

Professor: What is an encyclopedia? Student: Is it something like Wikipedia?

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I was viewing the presentation by Steven Walling titled “Why Wikipedians are the Weirdest People on the Internet” (embedded below) and the second slide was a twit by alisonclement which says:

Yesterday I asked one of my students if she knew what an encyclopedia is,
and she said, Is it something like Wikipedia?

Amazing! Changing times indeed, I remember when I was a kid and one of the most valuable things in our house was a 20-something volumes encyclopedia, admiringly and respectfully placed at the center of our best cupboard … ;)