Biographical social networks on Wikipedia

Abstract

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 language Wikipedias and highlight the shared knowledge about connections between persons across cultures.

Interactions of Cultures and Top People of Wikipedia from Ranking of 24 Language Editions

“…Thus it is rather natural to analyze a ranking of people according to the Wikipedia hyper-link network of citations between articles (see network data description below). A cross-cultural study of biographical articles was presented in [ 20 ], by building a network of interlinked biographies. Another approach was proposed recently in [ 21 ]: the difference in importance of historical figures across Wikipedia language editions is assessed on the basis of the global ranking of Wikipedia articles about persons.…”

Examining Collective Memory Building in Wikipedia: A Multilevel Network Approach

“…For example, Aragon and his colleagues [13] conducted a cross-cultural study of network links between biographical articles in Wikipedia. The finding revealed great similarities between Wikipedias from different language versions, especially for geographically and linguistically closer communities.…”

“…Jaccard coefficient is a representative measurement method among various similarity indexes. It counts the proportion of the times that two nodes are linked to the same alter [13]. Figure 1.…”

Conceptualising Inspiration Networks in Game Design

“…Because networks can be very heavily connected, they are sometimes called complex networks. Complex networks been used to model citation networks (Garfield 1955;Price 1965;Hummon and Doreian 1989;Vazquez 2001;Albert and Barabási 2002, p. 53), blogospheres (Adar and Zhang 2004), design networks (Eckert and Stacey 2000;Grace 2011, p. 19), Wikipedia networks (Schönhofen 2006;Zlatic et al 2006;Brandes et al 2009;Massa 2011;Aragon et al 2012) and births and deaths (Schich et al 2014), to name a small percentage of the works available.…”

“…Adar and Zhang (2004) used hyperlinks in blog posts to construct a network around blogospheres and used their data to derive a ranking system. It is worth noting that half a century since its birth, Garfield' Aragon et al 2012). These implicit networks are not artificial but naturally occurring (Adar and Zhang 2004).…”