I'm working under the paper devoted to cultural differences in Wikipedia. Therefore, i have done some literature research where i found some interesting resources devoted to this topic. Following I'm sharing them with you.
Wikipedia has
been found in early 2001 and since then has been one of the most successful and
referenced source of knowledge with a qualitative information[1]. The
open Encyclopedia can include opinions of any person wherever she geographically
located. Wikipedia is organized in such a way that any culture can open its
Wikipedia and use its own language for providing content.
According to
Hofstede (1991) "culture is the collective programming of the mind which
distinguish[sic] one group of people from the other"(Hofstede, 1991). Cultural
patterns together create a complex culture structure that can be examined
through studying cultural dimensions (Hall, 1976; 1983; Hofstede, 1991;
Kluckhohn and Strodbeck 1961; Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner, 1998). Hofstede
defined 5 dimensions of culture and calculate empirically dimension rates of
many nationalities in the World. The dimensions has become recently a standard
framework for cross-cultural research projects. Some works about Wikipedia
cross-cultural nature use Hofstede’s dimensions. Courtesy behaviors in the
Eastern Wikipedia are explained by high value of power distance and preferable
collective work (Hara et al., 2010). They claimed that authors from Western Wikipedia
have more conflict and disagreement behaviors. Moreover, they argue that patterns
of author behavior differ in the size of Wikipedia. They analyzed only 4 Wikipedia
of various sizes focusing on differences between eastern and western cultures.
Hofstede’s
dimensions were used in measuring the quality of the article game (Pfeil et al., 2006). The researchers
analyzed the Wikipedia article from French, German, Japanese and Dutch Wikipedia.
They found that even if cultures have positively correlated Hofstede's
dimensions, Wikipedia quality criteria of considered Wikipedia are different. More
evidence of cultural influence in Wikipedia was found by Pembe & Bingol (2006)
during comparing linguistic structures of English and German Wikipedia. Although
the English Wikipedia is larger; the German Wikipedia included at that point more
words associated with family concept.
Rask
(2007) analyzed differences between aspects of Wikipedia in developed and
developing countries. He considered the number of contributors and edits per
articles from different countries and concluded that richer countries profit
more on the knowledge shared in Wikipedia. Rask compared different Wikipedia
from the economical point of view using the human development index[2] in
his observations.
The
attempts to define cultural patterns include examination of Wikipedia user
talks and talk contents, contents of articles and numbers of edits. In this
paper we focus on a still untouched area for cultural patterns in Wikipedia. We
observe author networks over the course of time and differentiate between
registered and anonymous authors. Moreover, the geographical location of
authors and their migrations to other countires is taken into consideration.
Furthermore, we find Wikipedia users contributing to several Wikipedia and
analyze their behavior and geographical location. These and other findings
devoted to Wikipedia growth and editing behaviors are used to define cultural
patterns.
Voss
(2005) was the first who as many other researchers analyzed fundamentals of
Wikipedia and their networks. His main focus was on the German Wikipedia and
its graph of links. He showed that the Wikipedia network is scale-free (Barabási
et al., 1999). Moreover, Voss found that the number of user talk pages is much
higher in Japanese than in German, Danish or Croatian Wikipedia although he left
questions concerning cultural differences of Wikipedia unanswered.
In
the next section, we consider name existing research works examining Wikipedia
networks. Later, we present our methodology, and afterwards explain the data
set we are using. The results include findings about authors, their behaviors,
author networks, and articles. The paper concludes with a discussion and an outlook
on future work.
Dynamic
development of Wikipedia network
Dynamic development
of networks was in the focus by many works (Klamma and Haasler, 2008a, 2008b; Capocci
et. al, 2006, Zlatic et. al, 2006). Klamma and Haasler (2008a, 2008b)
visualized different Wiki projects (Berlin Wiki, Google Wiki, Aachen Wiki) and observed
their changes over the course of time. They found that registered users often
serve as connectors in networks of anonymous users. Moreover, they showed that
a tiny number of Wikipedia contributors created or edited the majority of
articles. Klamma and Haasler created Wikiwatcher tool that can be used for
retrieving Wikipedia data, visualize their networks and calculate simple SNA
values.
Analysis of
Wikipedia as complex networks reveals that the growth of Wikipedia happens
according to the preferential attachment (Barabási et al, 1999). Capocci et. al,
(2006) showed similarities of evolution patterns of complex networks of WWW and
different Wikipedia: new nodes are more probably connected with existed nodes
with high degrees of connections. Zlatic et. al (2006) examined 11 Wikipedia
networks of articles. The researchers concentrated on article network measures
and its comparison. They argue that the growth of Wikipedia networks is unique
for different language versions of Wikipedia.
References:
Barabási,
A.-L., Réka A., Hawoong J. (1999): Mean-field theory for scale-free random
networks.
Hall, E.T. (1976). Beyond culture. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
Hall, E.T. (1983). The dance of life. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
Hara,
N., Shachaf, P., & Hew, K. (2010). Cross cultural analysis of the Wikipedia
community. Journal of the American Society of Information Science and
Technology, 61(10), 2097‐2108.
Hofstede,
G.H. (1991). Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind. London: McGraw Hill.
Kluckhohn, C., &
Strodbeck, F.L. (1961). Variation in value orientation. Evanson, IL: Row and
Peterson.
Pembe, F., & Bingol, H. (2006). Complex networks in
different languages: A study of an emergent multilingual encyclopedia, Proceedings of Sixth
International Conference on Complex Systems, June 25-30, 2006, Boston, MA, USA.
Pfeil, U., Zaphiris, P., & Ang, C.S. (2006). Cultural differences in
collaborative authoring of Wikipedia. Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication, 12(1), article 5.
Rask, M.(2007), The Richness and Reach of Wikinomics: Is the Free
Web-Based Encyclopedia Wikipedia Only for the Rich Countries?. Proceedings of
the Joint Conference of The International Society of Marketing Development and
the Macromarketing Society, June 2-5, 2007.
Trompenaars,
F., & Hampden-Turner. C. (1998). Riding the waves of culture: Understanding
cultural diversity in global business. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Voß, J. (2005). Measuring Wikipedia, Proceedings of the 10th ISSI
2005 Conference, July 24-28, 2005, Stockholm, Sweden, 1-12.
