Population preferences through Wikipedia edits

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Wikipedia edits reflect the cultural preferences of language-speaking communities, aiming to understand cultural identity preservation amidst globalization.

Contribution

It introduces a method to analyze Wikipedia editing patterns across languages as a footprint of collective cultural identity.

Findings

Different languages show distinct editing patterns and preferences.

The analysis reveals cultural priorities in Wikipedia content across languages.

Results suggest Wikipedia can serve as a cultural footprint indicator.

Abstract

In this work, we are interested in the inner-cultural background shaping broad people's preferences. Our interest is also to track this human footprint, as it has the tendency to disappear due to the nowadays globalization. Given that language is a social construction, it is part of the historical reservoir, shaping the cultural (and hence collective) identity, then helping the community to archive accumulated knowledge about its culture and identity. We assume that the collective interest of a language-speaking community to document their events, people and any feature important for them, by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, can act as a footprint of the whole group's collective identity. The analysis of the language's preferences into categories among several languages, could have also applications into the field of Multilingual Natural Language Processing (MNLP). We, then, report results about the number of edits, editors, and pages into categories, displayed by the several languages. Results are shown by several angles, and some extra measures complement the analysis.