[Wiki-research-l] Wikimedia Research Showcase June 15

[Emily Lescak]

Hi all,

The next Research Showcase, *Wikipedia's Languages*, will be live-streamed
Wednesday, June 15, at 4:00 AM PST/11:00 AM UTC. View your local time here
.

YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZQM1dtn3g0

You are welcome to ask questions via YouTube chat or on IRC at
#wikimedia-research.

This month's presentations:
Quantifying knowledge synchronisation in the 21st centuryBy *Jisung Yoon
(Pohang University of Science and Technology)*Humans acquire and accumulate
knowledge through language usage and eagerly exchange their knowledge for
advancement. Although geographical barriers had previously limited
communication, the emergence of information technology has opened new
avenues for knowledge exchange. However, it is unclear which communication
pathway is dominant in the 21st century. Here, we explore the dominant path
of knowledge diffusion in the 21st century using Wikipedia, the largest
communal dataset. We evaluate the similarity of shared knowledge between
population groups, distinguished based on their language usage. When
population groups are more engaged with each other, their knowledge
structure is more similar, where engagement is indicated by socio-economic
connections, such as cultural, linguistic, and historical features.
Moreover, geographical proximity is no longer a critical requirement for
knowledge dissemination. Furthermore, we integrate our data into a
mechanistic model to better understand the underlying mechanism and suggest
that the knowledge "Silk Road" of the 21st century is based online.


The Language Geography of WikipediaBy *Martin Dittus*Every language is a
system of being, doing, knowing, and imagining. With over 7,000 active
languages in the world, how many languages are fully represented online? To
answer this question, digital non-profit Whose Knowledge? initiated the
first ever report on the State of the Internet's Languages. As part of this
report, Martin Dittus and Mark Graham have investigated the languages of
Wikipedia. Wikipedia began with a single English-language edition more than
two decades ago, and now offers more than 300 language editions, which
places it at the forefront of digital language support. However, this does
not mean that speakers of these languages get access to the same content:
Wikipedia’s language editions vary widely in scale. We further find that
this inequality is also reflected in Wikipedia’s geographic coverage: not
all places are captured in every language. Wikipedia's coverage often
follows the global distribution of speakers of the respective language. Yet
even when we account for the distribution of language populations, certain
language communities are much more strongly represented on Wikipedia than
others. As a consequence, we find that for many countries in Africa,
Central and South America, and South Asia, most of the content about those
countries is in a foreign language, often a European-colonial language. In
other words, in many of these places, people may need to be able to speak a
second (possibly foreign) language in order to access Wikipedia information
about their own places. Why do we see these differences? And what can be
done to improve things?

You can also watch our past research showcases here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase


Emily, on behalf of the Research team

--
Emily Lescak (she / her)
Senior Research Community Officer
The Wikimedia Foundation
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