Wikipedia Culture Gap: Quantifying Content Imbalances Across 40 Language Editions

Abstract

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is the largest general information repository created through collaborative efforts from all over the globe. Despite the project's goal being to achieve the sum of human knowledge, there are strong content imbalances across the language editions. In order to quantify and investigate these imbalances, we study the impact of cultural context in 40 language editions. To this purpose, we developed a computational method to identify articles that can be related to the editors' cultural context associated to each Wikipedia language edition. We employed a combination of strategies taking into account geolocated articles, specific keywords and categories, as well as links between articles. We verified the method's quality with manual assessment and found an average precision of 0.92 and an average recall of 0.95. The results show that about a quarter of each Wikipedia language edition is dedicated to represent the corresponding cultural context. Although a considerable part of this content was created during the first years of the project, its creation is sustained over time. An analysis of cross-language coverage of this content shows that most of it is unique in its original language, and reveals special links between cultural contexts; at the same time, it highlights gaps where the encyclopedia could extend its content. The approach and findings presented in this study can help to foster participation and inter-cultural enrichment of Wikipedias. The datasets produced are made available for further research.

The Role of Local Content in Wikipedia: A Study on Reader and Editor Engagement

“…Language selection. In line with related studies (Miquel-Ribé & Laniado, 2018;Miquel-Ribé & Laniado, 2019), in our dataset the percentage of CCC for the first forty languages in the number of articles is 23.1%, while for the entire set of 304 languages it is 12.5%; in 165 Wikipedia language editions, CCC occupies less than 10% of their content. 127 Wikipedia language editions contain less than 100 articles geolocated in their territories and 204 less than 100 articles including keywords such as the territory name or the language name on their title.…”

“…Culture gaps between the different language editions occur when articles belonging to CCC have no equivalent in other language editions (Miquel-Ribé & Laniado, 2018). It may not be possible to bridge the gaps in their completion, but ensuring a minimal coverage of every culture seems a reasonable goal.…”

“…To assess the extent of content representing the languages' geographical and cultural context in each Wikipedia language edition, in our previous work (Miquel-Ribé & Laniado, 2016) we proposed a method to collect all the articles that relate to the language, people and territories where the language is spoken. We called it Cultural Identity Related Articles (CIRA), and in later work Cultural Context Content (Miquel-Ribé & Laniado, 2018;Miquel-Ribé & Laniado, 2019). In the following we will refer to such content as Cultural Context Content (CCC).…”

“…Editors create it regularly and often call it "local content", in opposition to the articles that are expected to be in every Wikipedia language edition as notably global knowledge. A significant part of it tends to be unique or exclusive to a single language edition (Miquel-Ribé & Laniado, 2018).…”

Why the World Reads Wikipedia

“…Several independent studies have covered specific aspects of cultural differences on Wikipedia. It was found that Wikipedia language editions have a high degree of self-focus, i.e., bias towards the knowledge of the editor community [10,21] and set different priorities on the information included [5,13,17,30]. Those studies all focus on the editor or content perspective of Wikipedia, while in this paper we investigate the motivations and behaviors of readers.…”