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: 
http://www.cse.usf.edu/dsg/data/publications/papers/culture_ht.pdf

Hope this can be useful.
Alessandro

–––
Alessandro Piscopo
Web and Internet Science Group
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
email: a.pisc...@soton.ac.uk<mailto:a.pisc...@soton.ac.uk>

On 24 Jul 2018, at 18:27, Peter Meyer 
<econte...@gmail.com<mailto:econte...@gmail.com>> wrote:

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 patents are 
filed only by single individuals there might be just as many inventions, but 
the networks are not built together as much.

The study looked at patents in Sweden and Spain in the 19th century.  It is by 
David Andersson and Patricio Saiz who are experts in the patent data from these 
countries.  They found the Swedish patents were likely to be coauthored, and 
the Spanish ones were not.  They looked at the resulting network links.  They 
argue that it led to more industrialization and growth in the Swedish case than 
in the Spanish case.

This is very helpful and insightful I thought.  it was kind of gripping because 
they make a connection over the course of 100 years, in which the individuals 
from the early period are no longer relevant in the later period; it is an 
assertion about a long-lasting property.

Is this from a more cooperative culture in one place, and the opportunity for 
such networks to industrialize using later technologies?  Or, is it a result of 
different industries naturally springing up in the different countries?  Not 
entirely clear.

However the link to a fundamentally flexible cooperative cultures that exist 
before wikipedia could explain the differences in growth.   This is one paper 
to analogize to.  Maybe the places where patents are most coauthored also 
generate larger decentralized/cooperative works.

On Jul 24, 2018, at 8:19 AM, Pierre-Carl Langlais 
<pierrecarl.langl...@gmail.com<mailto:pierrecarl.langl...@gmail.com>> wrote:

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 social dynamics can be explained by the initial 
choices / tastes of a limited set of individuals. Of course, they may in turn 
result from a wider cultural background but also may be simply idiosyncratic.

I guess discriminating this factor would be quite hard. Perhaps using 
contributing data (when they exist) in the dumps and the archives of mailing 
lists would help at least to get a general idea of the initial social 
environment.

Alexander Doria / PCL

Le 24 juil. 2018 à 12:04, Juliana Bastos Marques 
<domusau...@gmail.com<mailto:domusau...@gmail.com>> a écrit :

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. It's packed with hard deletionists,
very hostile to newcomers and split into groups constantly fighting for
power. I'm sure that's part of why PT:WP isn't bigger.

Juliana

On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 10:53 AM, Amir E. Aharoni <
amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il<mailto:amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il>> wrote:

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
translate information between languages that use it, especially for things
like towns and biographies. The Korean alphabet is used only by one
language, but the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets are used by many (with
variations).
3. How long is the tradition of *actually* having public education for
everybody: rich and poor, cities and villages? By "actually" I mean "not
just by law, but in practice".
4. How long is the tradition of mostly-universal literacy? ("Literacy" is
one of the most fuzzily defined concepts. Here I refer to something like
"being able to read a newspaper and to write a one-page letter in one's own
native language".)
5. How long is the tradition of having public libraries in most towns and
villages?
6. How common is it to know other languages?
7. How isolated or open is the society that speaks this language in terms
of access to media from other countries, translation of literature from
other languages, travel to other countries?
8. How widespread are basic computer literacy skills: using a web browser;
sending an email; copying, down/uploading, and deleting files.
9. How long is the tradition of having language resources, such as
dictionaries, spelling standards, thesauri, style guides?
10. Is the language used completely in public education for teaching,
textbooks, and homework? Or is the education mostly done in a foreign
language? (This, roughly, is the situation in the Philippines and in many
African countries.)
11. When did the language become an official language of a country? (If at
all.)
12. Are there political, cultural, or government-suported movements for
language development or preservation?
13. When did it become universally possible to fully write this language on
a computer, with complete keyboards and fonts support? E.g., English has
been easy to use on any computer for as long as there are computers;
Polish, German, Russian and many other languages have been supported for a
long time, but still struggled with encodings and diacritics in the 1990s;
India and Burma are still struggling; I'm not sure about Korea.

These are the immediate things I can think about. There are probably many
more criteria that could be considered.

The economics around a country are probably very important (poverty, access
to infrastructure, healthcare, etc.), and you mentioned in your first email
that you accounted for it, although I don't know in how much detail, so I
trust you on that :)


בתאריך 24 ביולי 2018 12:04,‏ "Piotr Konieczny" 
<pio...@post.pl<mailto:pio...@post.pl>> כתב:

Dear all,

I am working on a paper on why/whether people contribute (or not) to
collective intelligence differently projects in different countries. The
paper was inspired, partially, by several discussions I had with various
people on why different language Wikipedia's have different sizes,
besides (doh) the popularity of the language (and yes, English is
biggest because it is international; and yes, I am aware a few
Wikipedias are outliers because of bots creating machine translations or
auto-populating villages or such). But for example, Poland and South
Korea have roughly similar population/speakers and development status,
yet Polish Wikipedia is over 3x the size of the SK one and no bot can
account for that. So, there's more to that. I am already feeding dozens
of parameters to a spreadsheet for some modelling, but I a) wonder what
I might have missed - before a reviewer asks 'why didn't you check for
xyz' and b) would like to have a few nice sentences about how things
that people expect to matter do not (or vice versa). Hence, my question
to you all, in the form of this open question mini survey:

Why do you think different language Wikipedia's have different sizes,
outside of the popularity of a given language?

For reference, list of Wikipedias by size and language:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias

TIA!


--
Piotr Konieczny, PhD
http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus


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