Linguistic neighbourhoods: explaining cultural borders on Wikipedia through multilingual co-editing activity

TL;DR

This study analyzes Wikipedia's multilingual editing network to understand cultural borders, revealing that local connections and shared cultural factors, rather than English dominance, shape inter-language community similarities.

Contribution

It introduces a method to extract cultural borders from Wikipedia editing activity and tests hypotheses about social mechanisms influencing these borders.

Findings

English does not dominate co-editing similarities.

Linguistic similarity and shared religion explain community similarities.

Population and geography are weaker factors.

Abstract

In this paper, we study the network of global interconnections between language communities, based on shared co-editing interests of Wikipedia editors, and show that although English is discussed as a potential lingua franca of the digital space, its domination disappears in the network of co-editing similarities, and instead local connections come to the forefront. Out of the hypotheses we explored, bilingualism, linguistic similarity of languages, and shared religion provide the best explanations for the similarity of interests between cultural communities. Population attraction and geographical proximity are also significant, but much weaker factors bringing communities together. In addition, we present an approach that allows for extracting significant cultural borders from editing activity of Wikipedia users, and comparing a set of hypotheses about the social mechanisms generating these borders. Our study sheds light on how culture is reflected in the collective process of archiving knowledge on Wikipedia, and demonstrates that cross-lingual interconnections on Wikipedia are not dominated by one powerful language. Our findings also raise some important policy questions for the Wikimedia Foundation.