Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
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The document explores the role of multilinguals in editing different language editions of Wikipedia, highlighting the diversity in language-specific content and the editing behaviors of users. It presents hypotheses about editing patterns, such as the tendency for multilingual users to cross language boundaries, and analyzes data from top language editions to show the extent of multilingual engagement. The findings reveal that multilingual editors contribute significantly to articles less frequented by monolingual users, indicating their essential role in bridging language divides on the platform.
Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 1. Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing Scott A. Hale Oxford Internet Institute http://www.scotthale.net/pubs/?websci2014 25 June 2014 Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 2. Background, Motivations Wikipedia is global platform covering hundreds of languages despite evidence of balkanization (Taneja & Wu, in press) Past studies generally concentrate on one edition (usually English) Important variations across languages Content is diverse across languages (Hecht & Gergle, 2010) Each edition of Wikipedia shows a self-focus bias with more articles about regions where the language is spoken (Hecht & Gergle, 2009) Multilingual users may act as unconscious translators bridging language divides (Herring et al., 2007; Eleta & Golbeck, 2012) Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 3. Related work Why edit Wikipedia in a foreign language? Increased audience size (Crystal, 2003; Zuckerman, 2013) In a Uzbekistan survey, Internet users reported accessing content in foreign languages even while simultaneously reporting poor foreign language skills (Wei & Kolko, 2005) Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 4. Related work Why edit Wikipedia in a foreign language? Increased audience size (Crystal, 2003; Zuckerman, 2013) In a Uzbekistan survey, Internet users reported accessing content in foreign languages even while simultaneously reporting poor foreign language skills (Wei & Kolko, 2005) Editors of many editions of Wikipedia come from a wide variety of timezones suggesting that bilingual editors are present (Yasseri et al., 2012) In a survey of editors, half of all editors reported editing in multiple languages and 72% reported reading more than one language edition of Wikipedia.† † https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Editor Survey 2011/ Location %26 Language&oldid=8409990 Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 5. Hypotheses 1 Most editors will edit only one language edition 2 Multilingual users will edit different articles than monolingual users 3 When a user edits an article in another language that same user will usually also edit the corresponding article in his native language 4 Users writing primarily in smaller-sized language editions will be more likely to cross-language boundaries than users writing primarily in larger-sized language editions 5 Larger-sized language editions, English chief among them, will be more likely to have contributions from editors of different languages than smaller-sized language editions Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 6. Data All edits to any of the top 46 language editions (all editions with at least 100,000 articles) Recorded via the IRC stream (code at http://www.scotthale.net/pubs/?websci2014) 32 days (8 July to 9 August 2013) Edit meta-data datetime edition article title username size of edit flags (minor, bot, etc.) Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 7. Data cleaning Non-minor edits by registered, human users to articles Only edits to main (article) namespace Removed articles flagged as being created by ‘bots’ Removed anonymous users Removed undeclared bots and users with only one edit session in the month Require at least four edits and at least 2 edits to one edition Matching users and articles across languages Look for common usernames across language editions Check usernames are indeed linked global accounts WikiData dump to match articles across languages 55,568 users with a total of 3,518,955 edits (excluding the Simple English edition). Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 8. Data summary Language Edits Articles Users NP users NP edits English 1,389,647 518,405 27,476 18% 3% German 256,495 125,647 5,967 18% 2% French 250,828 106,027 4,549 25% 3% Spanish 191,934 66,848 4,338 24% 3% Russian 239,267 92,326 3,961 16% 1% Japanese 106,848 56,406 3,551 11% 2% Italian 160,191 69,534 2,919 25% 2% Chinese 112,888 42,937 2,309 14% 1% Portuguese 67,505 32,753 1,730 29% 4% Dutch 80,535 39,463 1,500 33% 3% Polish 67,038 37,393 1,454 30% 3% Top language editions: The Users column includes all users who edited the edition during the data collection period. A percentage of these users (NP users) are non-primary users who edited a different language edition more frequently. Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 9. Multilinguals vs Monolinguals 15.4% of users (8,544) edited multiple language editions. Figure: Density plot comparing the number of edits made by monolingual and multilingual Wikipedia users. Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 10. Hypotheses Most editors will edit only one language edition 2 Multilingual users will edit different articles than monolingual users 3 When a user edits an article in another language that same user will usually also edit the corresponding article in his native language 4 Users writing primarily in smaller-sized language editions will be more likely to cross-language boundaries than users writing primarily in larger-sized language editions 5 Larger-sized language editions, English chief among them, will be more likely to have contributions from editors of different languages than smaller-sized language editions Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 11. What do multilinguals edit? Only 2.6% of edits are from users writing in their non-primary languages. 44% of the articles edited by multilingual users in their non-primary languages were not edited by any monolingual user 2D density plot of the number of multilingual users editing articles in a non-primary language against the number of monolingual users editing the articles. Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 12. What do multilinguals edit? Histogram showing the distribution with which multilingual users edited articles in other languages that they also edited in their primary languages. The distribution is bimodal. A large number of users did not edit any of the same articles in their primary languages, but a large number of users always edited the same articles in their primary languages. Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 13. What do multilinguals edit? Histogram showing the distribution with which multilingual users edited articles in other languages that they also edited in their primary languages after removing edits to articles that do not exist in users’ primary languages. Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 14. Hypotheses Most editors will edit only one language edition Multilingual users will edit different articles than monolingual users Ö When a user edits an article in another language that same user will usually also edit the corresponding article in his native language 4 Users writing primarily in smaller-sized language editions will be more likely to cross-language boundaries than users writing primarily in larger-sized language editions 5 Larger-sized language editions, English chief among them, will be more likely to have contributions from editors of different languages than smaller-sized language editions Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 15. Variations by language Scatter plot of language size (number of unique users) and percentage of users who are multilingual (edit more than one language edition). The three editions with less than 10 users in the sample are omitted (Uzbek, Cebuano, and Waray-Waray). Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 16. Language crossings ar bg ca cs da de en es fa fifr he hu id it ja ko nl no pl pt ro ru sv tr uk zh Co-editing network graph Nodes represent language editions Directed, weighted edges show the log of the number of users primarily editing one language edition who edited another edition Only edges with weights over 1.96 standard deviations above the mean are shown Colors indicate communities found by the infomap community detection algorithm Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 17. Language crossings (English removed) ca cs de es fr it ja nl pl pt ru sv uk zh Co-editing network graph Nodes represent language editions Directed, weighted edges show the log of the number of users primarily editing one language edition who edited another edition Only edges with weights over 1.96 standard deviations above the mean are shown Colors indicate communities found by the infomap community detection algorithm Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 18. Hypotheses Most editors will edit only one language edition Multilingual users will edit different articles than monolingual users Ö When a user edits an article in another language that same user will usually also edit the corresponding article in his native language Users writing primarily in smaller-sized language editions will be more likely to cross-language boundaries than users writing primarily in larger-sized language editions Larger-sized language editions, English chief among them, will be more likely to have contributions from editors of different languages than smaller-sized language editions Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 19. Simple English No big changes if Simple English edition is considered Largest editor overlap with English edition Dedicated group of editors: 45% of editors editing Simple most frequently do not edit any other edition (similar to Esperanto) Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 20. Comparison with Twitter Similar percentages of users multilingual (11% in Twitter) Similar correlation between activity level and multilingualism Language size not correlated with multilingualism on Twitter; some language consistencies (Japanese, English) and some variations Hale, S. A. (2014). Global Connectivity and Multilinguals in the Twitter Network. http://www.scotthale.net/pubs/?chi2014 Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 21. Implications and future directions Implications Multilingual users found in all editions; correlation with activity Design for multilingual users (universal language selector and global accounts already progress in this direction) Important per language variations Inverse correlation between multilingual users and self-focus bias as measured by Hecht (2009) Further work Move from edit meta-data to edit content itself What type of edits are users making in non-primary languages? Variations by topic/theme? Correlations with link/image overlap? Viewing vs. editing behavior (survey results show much higher percentage of users read multiple editions) Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 22. Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing Scott A. Hale Oxford Internet Institute http://www.scotthale.net/pubs/?websci2014 25 June 2014 Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing I would like to thank Eric T. Meyer, Taha Yasseri, Jonathan Bright, and Mike Thelwall as well as the anonymous reviewers who provided helpful comments on previous versions of this research.
- 23. Crystal, D. (2003). English as a Global Language (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eleta, I., & Golbeck, J. (2012). Bridging Languages in Social Networks: How Multilingual Users of Twitter Connect Language Communities. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 49(1), 1–4. Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/meet.14504901327 Hale, S. A. (2014). Global Connectivity and Multilinguals in the Twitter Network. In Proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 833–842). New York, NY, USA: ACM. Available from http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2556288.2557203 Hecht, B., & Gergle, D. (2009). Measuring self-focus bias in community-maintained knowledge repositories. In Proceedings of the fourth international conference on communities and technologies (pp. 11–20). New York, NY, USA: ACM. Available from http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1556460.1556463 Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 24. Hecht, B., & Gergle, D. (2010). The Tower of Babel meets Web 2.0: User-generated content and its applications in a multilingual context. In Proceedings of the 28th international conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 291–300). New York, NY, USA: ACM. Available from http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753370 Herring, S. C., Paolillo, J. C., Ramos-Vielba, I., Kouper, I., Wright, E., Stoerger, S., et al. (2007). Language Networks on LiveJournal. In Proceedings of the 40th annual hawaii international conference on system sciences. Washington, DC, USA: IEEE Computer Society. Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2007.320 Wei, C. Y., & Kolko, B. E. (2005). Resistance to globalization: Language and Internet diffusion patterns in Uzbekistan. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 11(2), 205–220. Yasseri, T., Sumi, R., & Kert´esz, J. (2012). Circadian Patterns of Wikipedia Editorial Activity: A Demographic Analysis. PLoS ONE, 7(1), e30091. Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030091 Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
- 25. Zuckerman, E. (2013). Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection. London: W. W. Norton & Company. Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing