research-article

Information asymmetry in Wikipedia across different languages: : A statistical analysis

Authors:

Prateek JainAuthors Info & Claims

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Volume 73, Issue 3

Pages 347 - 361

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24553

Published: 07 February 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Wikipedia is the largest web‐based open encyclopedia covering more than 300 languages. Different language editions of Wikipedia differ significantly in terms of their information coverage. In this article, we compare the information coverage in English Wikipedia (most exhaustive) and Wikipedias in 8 other widely spoken languages, namely Arabic, German, Hindi, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. We analyze variations in different language editions of Wikipedia in terms of the number of topics covered as well as the amount of information discussed about different topics. Further, as a step towards bridging the information gap, we present WikiCompare—a browser plugin that allows Wikipedia readers to have a comprehensive overview of topics by incorporating missing information from Wikipedia page in other language.

References

[1]

Adafre, S. F., & de Rijke, M. (2006). Finding similar sentences across multiple languages in Wikipedia. In Proceedings of workshop on new text wikis and blogs and other dynamic text sources. (pp. 62–69). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/W06-2810.pdf.

[2]

Adar, E., Skinner, M., & Weld, D. S. (2009). Information arbitrage across multi‐lingual Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the second acm WSDM (pp. 94–103). ACM.

[3]

Balaraman, V., Razniewski, S., & Nutt, W. (2018). Recoin: Relative completeness in wikidata. In Companion of the the web conference 2018 on the web conference 2018 (pp. 1787–1792). ACM.

[4]

Bao, P., Hecht, B., Carton, S., Quaderi, M., Horn, M., & Gergle, D. (2012). Omnipedia: Bridging the Wikipedia language gap. In Proceedings of SIGCHI (pp. 1075–1084). ACM.

[5]

Barrón‐Cedeno, A., Paramita, M. L., Clough, P., & Rosso, P. (2014). A comparison of approaches for measuring cross‐lingual similarity of Wikipedia articles. In Proceedings of ECIR (pp. 424–429). Springer.

[6]

Bhatia, S., & Jain, A. (2016). Context sensitive entity linking of search queries in enterprise knowledge graphs. In The semantic web ‐ ESWC (pp. 50–54). Springer.

[7]

Bhatia, S., & Vishwakarma, H. (2018). Know thy neighbors, and more!: Studying the role of context in entity recommendation. In Proceedings of 29th HT (pp. 87–95). ACM.

[8]

Blumenstock, J. E. (2008). Size matters: Word count as a measure of quality on Wikipedia. In J. Huai, R. Chen, H.‐W. Hon, & Y. Liu (Eds.), Proceedings of 17th international conference on world wide web (pp. 1095–1096). ACM.

Digital Library

[9]

Callahan, E. S., & Herring, S. C. (2011). Cultural bias in Wikipedia content on famous persons. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62(10), 1899–1915.

Digital Library

[10]

Carmel, D., Roitman, H., & Zwerdling, N. (2009). Enhancing cluster labeling using Wikipedia. In Proceedings of 32nd SIGIR (pp. 139–146). ACM.

[11]

de Melo, G., & Weikum, G. (2010). Untangling the cross‐lingual link structure of Wikipedia. In Proceedings of 48th ACL (pp. 844–853). Association for Computational Linguistics.

[12]

Ferrández, S., Toral, A., Ferrández, O., Ferrández, A., & Munoz, R. (2007). Applying Wikipedias multilingual knowledge to cross‐lingual question answering. In International conference on application of natural language to information systems (pp. 352–363). Springer.

[13]

Filatova, E. (2009). Directions for exploiting asymmetries in multilingual Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the third international workshop on cross lingual information access: Addressing the information need of multilingual societies (pp. 30–37). Association for Computational Linguistics.

Digital Library

[14]

Hale, S. A. (2014). Multilinguals and Wikipedia editing. In Proceedings of acm conference on web science (pp. 99–108). ACM.

[15]

Harige, R., & Buitelaar, P. (2016). Generating a large‐scale entity linking dictionary from Wikipedia link structure and article text. In Proceedings of 10th LREC (pp. 2431–2434). Association for Computational Linguistics.

[16]

Hecht, B., & Gergle, D. (2009). Measuring self‐focus bias in community‐maintained knowledge repositories. In Proceedings of 4th conference on communities and technologies (pp. 11–20). ACM.

[17]

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 SIGCHI (pp. 291–300). ACM.

[18]

Hieber, F., & Riezler, S. (2015). Bag‐of‐words forced decoding for cross‐lingual information retrieval. In Proceedings of 2015 NAACL (pp. 1172–1182). Association for Computational Linguistics.

[19]

Katz, G., Shtock, A., Kurland, O., Shapira, B., & Rokach, L. (2014). Wikipedia‐based query performance prediction. In Proceedings of 37th SIGIR (pp. 1235–1238). ACM.

[20]

King, I., & Baeza‐Yates, R. (2009). Weaving services and people on the world wide web. Springer.

Digital Library

[21]

Lam, S. T. K., Uduwage, A., Dong, Z., Sen, S., Musicant, D. R., Terveen, L., & Riedl, J. (2011). Wp:clubhouse? An exploration of Wikipedia's gender imbalance. In Proceedings of the 7th international symposium on wikis and open collaboration (p. 110). ACM.

[22]

Lewoniewski, W. (2017). Completeness and reliability of Wikipedia infoboxes in various languages. In Business information systems workshops (Vol. 303, pp. 295–305). Springer.

[23]

Lewoniewski, W. (2018, 2018). Measures for quality assessment of articles and infoboxes in multilingual Wikipedia. In Business information systems workshops (Vol. 339, pp. 619–633). Springer.

[24]

Lewoniewski, W., Wecel, K., & Abramowicz, W. (2016). Quality and importance of Wikipedia articles in different languages. In Information and software technologies (Vol. 639, pp. 613–624). Springer.

[25]

Lewoniewski, W., Wecel, K., & Abramowicz, W. (2017a). Analysis of references across Wikipedia languages. In Information and software technologies (Vol. 756, pp. 561–573). Springer.

[26]

Lewoniewski, W., Wecel, K., & Abramowicz, W. (2017b). Relative quality and popularity evaluation of multilingual Wikipedia articles. Informatics, 4(4), 43.

[27]

Li, W., Peng, R., Wang, Y., & Yan, Z. (2020). Knowledge graph based natural language generation with adapted pointer‐generator networks. Neurocomputing, 382, 174–187.

Digital Library

[28]

Luyt, B. (2013). History on Wikipedia: In need of a NWICO (new world information and communication order)? The case of Cambodia. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 64(6), 1193–1202.

[29]

Luyt, B. (2018). Wikipedia's gaps in coverage: Are wikiprojects a solution? A study of the cambodian wikiproject. Online Information Review, 42(2), 238–249.

[30]

Massa, P., & Scrinzi, F. (2013). Manypedia: Comparing language points of view of Wikipedia communities. First Monday, 18(1). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v18i1.3939.

[31]

Paramita, M. L., Clough, P. D., & Gaizauskas, R. J. (2017). Using section headings to compute cross‐lingual similarity of Wikipedia articles. In Proceedings of 39th ECIR (pp. 633–639). Springer.

[32]

Park, S., Kim, S., Hale, S. A., Kim, S., Byun, J., & Oh, A. (2015). Multilingual Wikipedia: Editors of primary language contribute to more complex articles. In Ninth international aaai conference on web and social media. Association for the Advancement of ArtificialIntelligence.

[33]

Pfeil, U., Zaphiris, P., & Ang, C. S. (2006). Cultural differences in collaborative authoring of Wikipedia. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 12(1), 88–113.

[34]

Potthast, M., Stein, B., & Anderka, M. (2008). A Wikipedia‐based multilingual retrieval model. In Proceedings of 30th ECIR (pp. 522–530). Springer.

[35]

Roy, D., Bhatia, S., & Jain, P. (2020). A topic‐aligned multilingual corpus of Wikipedia articles for studying information asymmetry in low resource languages. In Proceedings of 12th LREC (pp. 2373–2380). European Language Resources Association.

[36]

Royal, C., & Kapila, D. (2009). What's on Wikipedia, and what's not?: Assessing completeness of information. Social Science Computer Review, 27(1), 138–148.

Digital Library

[37]

Shirakawa, M., Nakayama, K., Hara, T., & Nishio, S. (2013). Probabilistic semantic similarity measurements for noisy short texts using Wikipedia entities. In Proceedings of 22nd CIKM (pp. 903–908). ACM.

[38]

Wagner, C., García, D., Jadidi, M., & Strohmaier, M. (2015). It's a man's Wikipedia? Assessing gender inequality in an online encyclopedia. In Proceedings of ninth international conference on web and social media (pp. 454–463). Association for the Advancement of ArtificialIntelligence.

[39]

Warncke‐Wang, M., Cosley, D., & Riedl, J. (2013). Tell me more: An actionable quality model for Wikipedia. In Proceedings of 9th international symposium on open collaboration (pp. 1–10). ACM.

[40]

Wu, F., & Weld, D. S. (2007). Autonomously semantifying Wikipedia. In Proceedings of 16th CIKM (pp. 41–50). ACM.

[41]

Wulczyn, E., West, R., Zia, L., & Leskovec, J. (2016). Growing Wikipedia across languages via recommendation. In Proceedings of 25th www (pp. 975–985). ACM.

[42]

Yamada, I., Asai, A., Sakuma, J., Shindo, H., Takeda, H., Takefuji, Y., & Matsumoto, Y. (2020). Wikipedia2vec: An efficient toolkit for learning and visualizing the embeddings of words and entities from Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 2020 EMNLP (Systems Demonstrations) (pp. 23–30). Association for Computational Linguistics.

[43]

Zhang, B., Lin, Y., Pan, X., Lu, D., May, J., Knight, K., & Ji, H. (2018). Elisa‐edl: A cross‐lingual entity extraction, linking and localization system. In Proceedings of NAACL: Demonstrations (pp. 41–45). Association for Computational Linguistic.

Cited By

Moás PLopes C(2023)Automatic Quality Assessment of Wikipedia Articles—A Systematic Literature ReviewACM Computing Surveys10.1145/362528656:4(1-37)Online publication date: 10-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3625286
Ashrafimoghari V(2023)Detecting Cross-Lingual Information Gaps in WikipediaCompanion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202310.1145/3543873.3587539(581-585)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3543873.3587539

Index Terms

Information asymmetry in Wikipedia across different languages: A statistical analysis

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

Recommendations

Interlingual indexing across different languages
RIAO '04: Coupling approaches, coupling media and coupling languages for information retrieval

We present two methods for automatic indexing, which are based on an interlingual layer of content description. In the first approach, we acquire indexing patterns from English documents by statistically relating interlingual representations of English ...
Automatic taxonomy extraction in different languages using wikipedia and minimal language-specific information
CICLing'12: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing - Volume Part I

Knowledge bases extracted from Wikipedia are particularly useful for various NLP and Semantic Web applications due to their co- verage, actuality and multilingualism. This has led to many approaches for automatic knowledge base extraction from ...
Information arbitrage across multi-lingual Wikipedia
WSDM '09: Proceedings of the Second ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining

The rapid globalization of Wikipedia is generating a parallel, multi-lingual corpus of unprecedented scale. Pages for the same topic in many different languages emerge both as a result of manual translation and independent development. Unfortunately, ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology Volume 73, Issue 3

March 2022

147 pages

ISSN:2330-1635

EISSN:2330-1643

DOI:10.1002/asi.v73.3

Issue’s Table of Contents

© 2021 Association for Information Science and Technology.

Publisher

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

United States

Publication History

Published: 07 February 2022

Qualifiers

Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

2
Total Citations
View Citations
0
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)0
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 21 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Moás PLopes C(2023)Automatic Quality Assessment of Wikipedia Articles—A Systematic Literature ReviewACM Computing Surveys10.1145/362528656:4(1-37)Online publication date: 10-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3625286
Ashrafimoghari V(2023)Detecting Cross-Lingual Information Gaps in WikipediaCompanion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202310.1145/3543873.3587539(581-585)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3543873.3587539

View Options

View options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents