Another issue in terms of choice of language to contribute in could relate to
their motivation to add the content and presumed audience for the content. A
multi-lingual person might decide to write about (say) magnetism in English (or
other widely spoken language) in the belief that magnetism
Hi, the second most obvious factor is going to be the availability of internet
access, but also the type of internet access, and how long people have had
internet access.
The unproven assumption is that Wikipedia is written by people with internet
experience and leisure time access to the
Very interesting project indeed!
There is a study presented at Hypertext 2015, in which the authors compared the
behaviour of Yahoo Answer users across several countries.
To perform their comparison, they used cultural metrics from previous studies,
which you may find useful.
Here’s the paper:
Regarding featured articles, I conducted a small study (should be out in
Oct.) on the Portuguese Wikipedia about those related to Ancient History.
Although the sample was obviously small, my findings were clear and
confirmed by many admins later: most articles are translations/new material
made by
on a slightly related note, I analyzed the cultural preferences for image,
references, links, word count etc. saturation in good and featured articles
on 8 wikis and found significant cultural variation:
http://crow.kozminski.edu.pl/papers/cultures%20of%20wikipedias.pdf
best,
dj
On Tue, Jul
Along this line I saw a terrific study recently looking at patent coauthors.
Patents can be filed by individuals or by multiple individuals, and if people
work together on patents in different groups this builds “networks” among
inventors, in which they have previous coauthorship links. If
Interesting topic! Here is a useful analogy regarding the distribution of
sizes. There has been study of how big cities are within countries or
worldwide, and there are recurring patterns of the scale of the largest to the
second largest, and the second-largest to the third, and so forth.
> Why do you think different language Wikipedia's have different
> sizes, outside of the popularity of a given language?
Piotr, if you model organic editing production with a Poisson
distribution, which is reasonable for a first approximation, 3x+
disparities are just natural for the same
This is a very interesting project.
Just in short remark in line with Juliana’s observation: the hardest part would
be to account for the specific "inner" culture developed by each wikimedian
communities. Since most of them has started on a relatively small scale,
numerous norms and lasting
One other thing to consider is the specifics of how a language
group/culture deals with collaborative work. I have no idea how to tackle
this, though I've seen some studies in that direction.
I'm sure some of you here have heard about the absolute mess and
conflict-ridden Portuguese Wikipedia.
Very interesting and much-needee research. Thanks for doing this. I'd love
to see the results and even the process.
Some things to consider:
1. How long is the tradition of having published encyclopedias in that
culture?
2. Alphabet: Using a common alphabet may make it somewhat easier to
Hi Piotr,
I would look into things such as distribution (is there one region of the
world Wikipedia is used more in general) and alternative projects (such as
Chinese Baidu) that might be more popular for people speaking the language.
And there might be some aspect to people living abroad editing
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