Multi-cultural Wikipedia mining of geopolitics interactions leveraging reduced Google matrix analysis

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how mining multilingual Wikipedia networks using reduced Google matrix analysis can reveal meaningful geopolitical interactions among 40 major countries, providing a multicultural perspective.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of reduced Google matrix analysis to multilingual Wikipedia data for uncovering direct and hidden geopolitical links.

Findings

Recovered meaningful direct and hidden links among countries

Compared interactions across five Wikipedia language editions

Highlighted multicultural differences in geopolitical relationships

Abstract

Geopolitics focuses on political power in relation to geographic space. Interactions among world countries have been widely studied at various scales, observing economic exchanges, world history or international politics among others. This work exhibits the potential of Wikipedia mining for such studies. Indeed, Wikipedia stores valuable fine-grained dependencies among countries by linking webpages together for diverse types of interactions (not only related to economical, political or historical facts). We mine herein the Wikipedia networks of several language editions using the recently proposed method of reduced Google matrix analysis. This approach allows to establish direct and hidden links between a subset of nodes that belong to a much larger directed network. Our study concentrates on 40 major countries chosen worldwide. Our aim is to offer a multicultural perspective on their interactions by comparing networks extracted from five different Wikipedia language editions, emphasizing English, Russian and Arabic ones. We demonstrate that this approach allows to recover meaningful direct and hidden links among the 40 countries of interest.