Cultural Configuration of Wikipedia: measuring Autoreferentiality in Different Languages

Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 316–322, Hissar, Bulgaria, 12-14 September 2011. Cultural Configuration of Wikipedia: Measuring Autoreferentiality in Different Languages Marc Miquel Ribé Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya mmiquel@lsi.upc.edu Horacio Rodríguez Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya horacio@lsi.upc.edu Abstract Among the motivations to write in Wikipedia given by the current literature there is often coincidence, but none of the studies presents the hypothesis of contributing for the visibil- ity of the own national or language related content. Similar to topical coverage studies, we outline a method which allows collecting the articles of this content, to later analyse them in several dimensions. To prove its uni- versality, the tests are repeated for up to twenty language editions of Wikipedia. Final- ly, through the best indicators from each di- mension we obtain an index which represents the degree of autoreferentiality of the ency- clopedia. Last, we point out the impact of this fact and the risk of not considering its exist- ence in the design of applications based on user generated content. 1 Introduction “Wikipedia is a free web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation”, this is the way Wikipedia (WP) is defined in the starting article of the English language edition. What it does not say is that it is the seventh most visited webpage in the Internet and sixteen million arti- cles prove its participation success. It requires a very complex governance system and one of its requisites and rule for achieving the goal of gath- ering all the human knowledge is maintaining the neutral point of view (NPOV) in its articles. The repository implements the wiki technolo- gy, which applies to the ease in creating or modi- fying text collaboratively as well as the property of linking words to other articles. Due to this differentiated characteristic which enhances the navigation through the content and also for being the focus of attention, WP becomes a highly studied object whose nature is social and tech- nical – textual, relational and quantitative (Orte- ga et al., 2007) – and is often analyzed by means of disciplines like Data Mining, Information Re- trieval or Natural Language Processing. Although WP maintains its goal and main rules in the almost three hundred language edi- tions in which it is available, the English one is by far the biggest in number of articles. Every WP community decides on which articles are a priority to create, organizes in what is called wikiprojects and ultimately writes the text. Both users and creators of a language edition share a common cultural background and specificities in the writing style. However, when studies ap- proach the community in terms of motivation they coincide they do it for fun, for appeal of the ideology or some sort of altruism (Nov, 2007). However, some informal surveys in Catalan WP association ‘Amical Viquipèdia’ showed how the national topics were a focus of interest for writ- ing and conflict. Could it not be then that some editors get involved due …

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