Cross-language Wikipedia Editing of Okinawa, Japan ScottA.Hale OxfordInternetInstitute,UniversityofOxford 1StGiles,Oxford,UKOX13JS scott.hale@oii.ox.ac.uk ABSTRACT hand,increasedlanguagediversitymayalsoincreasetherisk ThisarticleanalyzesuserswhoeditWikipediaarticlesabout of fragmenting content and users across languages, particu- Okinawa,Japan,inEnglishandJapanese. Itfindstheseusers larlyifmultilingualuserswhowouldhaveusedthesiteina 5 are among the most active and dedicated users in their pri- large,internationallanguagemoveexclusivelytosmallerlan- 1 mary languages, where they make many large, high-quality guageeditions.OnquestionandanswerplatformStackOver- 0 edits. However, when these users edit in their non-primary flow,theriskoffragmentation—thatis,theriskthatmultiple 2 languages, they tend to make edits of a different type that language editions of the site would result in fewer users to r are overall smaller in size and more often restricted to the any one particular language edition and therefore less high- a M narrow set of articles that exist in both languages. Design qualityanswers—hasbeencitedasoneofthereasonsforthe changes to motivate wider contributions from users in their platformtoremainmonolingual.1 2 non-primary languages and to encourage multilingual users Key to the trade-off between the potential increase in other- 2 totransfermoreinformationacrosslanguagedividesarepre- languageusersandtheriskoffragmentationacrosslanguages sented. aretherolestechnologyandusersplayinfacilitatingtheflow ] Y of information between languages. Previous research has ACMClassificationKeywords suggestedmultilingualuserswhoreadandcontributecontent C H.5.4 Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g. HCI): in multiple languages may share novel information between . Hypertext/Hypermedia; H.5.3 Information Interfaces and s languagesandbroadenthescopeofinformationavailableto Presentation(e.g. HCI):GroupandOrganizationInterfaces c monolingualusersonline[10,15,16,18]. Researchtodate, [ GeneralTerms however,haseitherexamineddifferencesincontentbetween 2 languages[6, 8, 18]orexamineduserbehavior[10, 15, 16], HumanFactors,Design v butnotboth. Thus,while15%oftheactiveeditorsonWiki- 7 pediacontributetomultiplelanguageeditions[16],itremains AuthorKeywords 5 unclearwhatcontentmultilingualuserscontribute,howmuch SocialMedia;InformationDiscovery;SocialNetwork 6 content they contribute, and how valuable the content they Analysis;InformationDiffusion;Cross-language; 0 contributeis. Thesequestionsareimportantinunderstanding 0 Wikipedia;Multilingual thecurrentrolesmultilingualusersplayintransferringinfor- . 1 mation between languages as well as gaining insight for de- INTRODUCTION 0 signingmultilingualplatformsinwaysthatmaximizecross- Allowinguserstocontributecontentinmultiplelanguageson 5 language information transfer. This paper starts to address user-generatedcontentplatformsresultsinalargedifference 1 thisgapbyexaminingthecontentcontributedbymultilingual : inthecontentavailableindifferentlanguages. WithinWiki- v pedia, for example, over 74% of concepts have an article in users in their primary and non-primary languages on one of i thelargestmultilingualuser-generatedcontentplatformson- X only one language edition, and more than 95% of concepts line,Wikipedia. Thefindingsleadtoamorein-depthunder- appear in six or fewer languages [18]. This finding is not r standing of the role multilingual users play on multilingual a uniquetoWikipedia: onTwitterthereisalsosurprisinglylit- user-generatedcontentplatformsandsuggestplatformdesign tleoverlapbetweenthetopdomainnamesandhashtagsused strategies. in tweets of different languages [19]. User-generated con- tentplatformsfaceatrade-offonallowingtheuseofmultiple languages. Ontheonehand,increasedlanguagediversityin- BACKGROUNDANDRELATEDWORK creases the potential number of contributors as monolingual EachlanguageeditionofWikipediaexhibitsaself-focus:that individuals from multiple languages can join. On the other is, each edition has, in general, more information about the regionswherethelanguageoftheeditionisspokenandless informationabouttheregionswherethelanguageisnotspo- ken [18]. Even when corresponding articles for a common conceptexistacrossmultiplelanguageeditions,thereisasur- prising diversity in the topics covered in each language edition’s article on that concept [5]. For example, the Spanish- 1http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/07/ (cid:13)c ScottA.Hale2014.Thisistheauthor’sversionofthework.Itispostedherefor non-english-question-policy/ yourpersonaluse.Notforredistribution.ThedefinitiveversionwaspublishedinCHI 2015,http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702346. 1 languagearticleonpsychologycontainsasectiononimpor- zerobytes. Usingthecontentofedits,thisstudycalculatesa tant contributions from Latin America that is not found in morenuancedmeasureofeditsizeusingthenumberofwords otherlanguageeditions[18]. added,thenumberofwordsremoved,andtheamountofre- organization performed. A second dimension by which to TheglobalnatureoftheInternetallowsforthepossibilitythat compare contributions is the types of content changes users expatriates, language-learners, and other-culture/language make in their non-primary languages. The study of 2010 enthusiasts (who Zuckerman [31] has termed xenophiles) Haitianearthquakeblogsfoundthatthesharingofimagesand canspreadinformationbetweenlanguagesonuser-generated videos was a large motivation for crossing language bound- contentplatforms. Inaone-monthstudyofeditstothetop46 ariesamongbloggers[14],whichsuggestsadding,removing, languageeditionsofWikipedia,Hale[16]foundthatapprox- or otherwise modifying images might be more prevalent in imately 15% of active Wikipedia users edited multiple lan- users’non-primarylanguages. guageeditionsoftheencyclopedia. Thesemultilingualusers were distributed across all language editions, but smaller- Thefinalresearchquestionposedinthispaperaskshowvalu- sized editions with fewer users had a higher percentage of ablearethecontributionsbymultilingualusersintheirnon- multilingualuserscomparedtolarger-sizededitions.Theper- primarylanguages? (RQ3). Giventhediversityininforma- centageofmultilingualusersprimarilyeditingeachlanguage tion between languages on Wikipedia [18] as well as online edition was found to negatively correlate with the self-focus moregenerally,editsbymultilingualusershavethepotential of the 15 editions studied by Hecht and Gergle [18]: that tointroducetrulynovelandvaluableinformationandsources is, editions with more multilingual users exhibited less self- from one language into articles in another language. Con- focus[16]. nections across languages may serve as “bridges” and have been compared to the concept of “weak ties” in social net- Multilingualusersarewellsituatedtoactasbridgesorgate- work analysis [10, 13], where ample scholarship has shown keepers and transfer content between languages; however, weak ties to be of critical importance to the spread of infor- past work points to a more nuanced picture of the extent to mation, withbenefitsascribedtoboththeindividualandthe which multilingual users actually fulfill this role. Studies of system/networkasawhole[7]. multilingualusersonTwittershowtheyareinstructuralpo- sitionstoactasbridgesacrosslanguagegroups[10,15]and The study of multilingual users on Wikipedia also found a thatapproximately11%ofactiveTwitteruserswriteinmulti- positivecorrelationbetweenmultilingualismandthenumber plelanguages[15].However,astudyofmultilingualuserson of edits users’ made in their primary languages: users more Twitter in Switzerland, Qatar, and Quebec using LDA topic active in their primary languages were more likely to edit modelingfoundthatmultilingualusersoftenfocusedondif- in multiple languages [16]. This suggests that multilingual ferenttopicsindifferentlanguages[20]. Thissuggeststhese users overlap to some extent with the group of very active multilingual users may not be bridging across languages as elite or power users on Wikipedia, on which, like on many muchastheirstructuralpositionssuggest. Asimilarsituation otherplatforms,muchoftheworkisdonebyasmallpercent- maybepresentinWikipedia,where43%ofthemultilingual age of very active users [29, 21]. Monolingual studies have usersstudiedbyHale[16]editedarticlesaboutdifferentcon- foundthattheseusersareresponsibleforadisproportionately ceptsintheirprimaryandnon-primarylanguages. large percentage ofthe content in the encyclopedia [21]and areoverwhelminglyresponsibleforthecontentthatisviewed The first research question of this paper, therefore, simply mostfrequently[29]. Itremainsunclear,however,howmuch askswhatarticlesdomultilingualseditintheirnon-primary contenttheseuserscontributeandhowlongitpersistswhen languages? (RQ1). This paper compares the articles mul- theyareeditingintheirnon-primarylanguages. tilingual users edit in their non-primary languages with the articles edited by other users to understand the scope within In order to investigate both users and content effectively, which multilingual users may transfer information between this paper focuses on content and multilingual user contri- languages. The results show that multilingual users edit a butionsinEnglishandJapaneseinarelativelycontainedge- narrower set of articles in their non-primary languages and ographic area: Okinawa, Japan. Okinawa is an archipelago suggest design interventions such as cross-language content ofsmall, sub-tropicalislandshometoalargenumberofna- recommendationsystemscouldbroadenthescopeofarticles tive Japanese speakers and a large number of native English userseditintheirnon-primarylanguages. speakers.2 Geographically closer to Taipei than Tokyo, the islandswereoncepartofaprosperousindependentkingdom Beyond what articles users edit in a non-primary language, built on trade in the region. After formal incorporation into thispaperalsoaskswhattypesofeditsdomultilingualusers Japan at the end of the 1800’s, the islands were separated makeintheirnon-primarylanguages? (RQ2)inordertoun- fromJapanattheendofWorldWarIIandadministeredbythe derstandthenatureandtheextentoftheinformationthatmul- United States until 1972. Since that time, the US has main- tilingualuserstransferbetweenlanguages. Afirstdimension tainedastrongpresence, withhalfofallUSpersonnel(mil- by which to compare contributions is size. Using the meta itary, contractors, dependents) in Japan under the US Status data available from Wikipedia, Hale [16] analyzed the dif- ofForcesAgreementlocatedinOkinawa. Thisaccountsfor ference in the size of articles before and after each edit in bytes, but that measure is not the most reliable as an edit that adds a large block of text but also removes a different 2TheauthorhaslivedinOkinawaandcanspeakJapaneseandEn- block of text could result in a size difference very close to glish. 2 justunder50,000individuals[24]withmilitaryfacilitiesoc- CorrespondingarticlesintheEnglishandJapaneselanguage cupyingjustover18%ofthelandareaofthelargestandmost editions were found using the October 2013 database dump populatedisland[26]. from WikiData.6 Launched in 2012, WikiData centralizes allinterlanguagelinks(and,increasingly,statisticsandother Previous qualitative studies of Wikipedia have found differ- structureddata)inonelocationandavoidssomepreviousis- ences in the editing behavior of users editing different lan- sueswithout-of-dateorconflictinginterlanguagelinkswhen guageeditionsofWikipedia—suchascorrelationswithHof- the links were separately maintained in each language edi- stede’s cultural dimensions [28]. These studies have not ex- tionofWikipedia. Foreachnon-anonymoususer,theCentral amined the roles played by users who edit in multiple lan- Authorizationdatabasewasqueriedwiththeusernametode- guages as is done in this article, but these previous studies termine if the username was a global account connected to do underscore the importance of studying users in multiple multiple language editions. If it was, the database for each languages before making generalizations. Nonetheless, En- language edition the user edited was queried to get the total glish and Japanese are good initial languages to study given numberofeditsperlanguagethattheusermadesincecreat- thattheyareamongthemost-usedlanguagesonline,notonly ingtheaccount. Thelanguageofeachuser’smosteditededi- on Wikipedia [16], but also on Twitter [15]. Furthermore, tionisreferredtoastheuser’sprimarylanguagethroughout speakers in each language play vastly different roles in in- thispaperwhilethelanguagesofanyothereditionseditedby terlanguageconnections[15,16]. Intheone-monthstudyof theuser arereferredtoas theuser’snon-primarylanguages. editstoWikipedia,Japanesewasamajoroutlierwithonly6% Users belonging to the (ro)‘bot’ group or having the ‘bot’ of the primary editors of the Japanese edition editing a sec- templateontheiruserpagesaswellasusersthathadbeensus- ondedition[16]. Incontrast,Englishwasverycentralinthe pendedformaliciouseditingwereremovedinordertofocus cross-languagemovementsofusers: whennon-Englishusers onthebehaviorofgood-faith,humaneditors.7 editedasecondedition,thateditionwasmostfrequentlyEn- glish[16]. Measuresofeditsizeandvalue Users contribute value to Wikipedia in many ways. For DATA example, Kriplean et al. [22] found 42 different types of Finding the subset of all articles related to a particular ge- contributions to Wikipedia through an analysis of barnstars ographic region on Wikipedia involves a trade-off between (personalized tokens of appreciation given to fellow users). directrelevanceandcompleteness(or,usingtheterminology Thetypesofcontributionstheyidentifiedincludedprogram- of information retrieval, between precision and recall). Us- mingtools/bots,designingtemplates,performingadministra- ingtheWikimediaLabs3 infrastructure,threearticlesamples tive functions, teaching, and leadership. Welser et al. [30] wereextractedinOctober2013. Thegeotagsampleincluded similarly identified multiple user roles by analyzing the dis- allarticleswithgeographicinformation(geotags)physically tribution of users’ edits across the different namespaces on placing the articles in Okinawa.4 The category sample in- Wikipedia(articles,articletalkpages,userpages,etc.). cluded all articles in any category that contained the word Inordertohaveonequantitativemeasureofthevalueofed- “Okinawa” for the English edition or “沖縄” (Okinawa) for itstoarticles,thispaperuseseditpersistence,followingpast theJapaneseedition. Finally,thearticlelinksampleincluded work analyzing Wikipedia in one language [1, 2, 3, 29]. In allarticlescontaining alinktoan articlestartingwith“Oki- particular,thispaperusesthealgorithmsdevelopedbyAdler nawa”fortheEnglisheditionortoanarticlestartingwith“沖 et al. [1, 2, 3] for their WikiTrust content-driven reputation 縄”(Okinawa)fortheJapaneseedition. Alleditstoeachar- system for Wikipedia to compute the extent to which each ticleineachsamplewerethendownloadedfromthedatethe editsurvivesthroughthenextsixrevisionstothearticle(edit article was created until October 2013 using the Wikipedia persistence). WikiTrust accounts for some of the complexi- API.5 tiesofWikipediaincludingdifferencescreatedbyrewording The article samples were filtered to only include articles in and rearranging text, and it also correctly attributes text that the main, article namespace (i.e. not talk pages, user pages, isdeletedandthenrestoredtothefirstauthorwhocontributed etc.). Thearticlelinksamplewasalsofilteredtoonlyinclude it(ratherthantotheauthorwhorestoredit)[2]. Editpersis- articlesthatmentionedOkinawainthemainbodytextofthe tence is calculated on a word-by-word basis for the next six article(i.e.nottranscludedviaatemplatetoappearinaside- revisionstoeacharticlesothatusersgetpartialcreditforan barorfooter).Thiswasdonesothatthearticlesinthesample edit even when part of their edit is subsequently changed or hadamoresubstantialconnectiontoOkinawathanjustbeing removed. partofalargegroupofarticleslinkedtogetherbyacommon WikiTrust also computes a more detailed measure of edit portal or category such as “Regions and administrative divi- sizesthanisreporteddirectlyfromWikipedia. Theeditsizes sions of Japan” or “USAAF Eighth Air Force in World War reportedbyWikipediasimplymeasurethedifferenceinpage II.” 6http://www.wikidata.org/ 7Thestatusofuseraccountswascheckedoneyearafterdatacollec- 3https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs tioninDecember2014toallowsufficienttimeformaliciouseditors 4Theboundingboxusedincludedarticlesbetween25.75and26.9E tobereportedandblocked.Thedataaswellasthecodeusedfordata and126and129N. collectionandanalysisareavailableathttp://www.scotthale. 5https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page net/pubs/?chi2015. 3 Sample en-only ja-only Both each Japanese article in the sample as a node, and one net- work for the English edition with each English article as a Geotag 52 185 152 node. Edgesinbothnetworksweretheinter-articlelinksbe- Category 156 2,819 707 tweenarticlesinthesamelanguageedition. Nodeswerethen Articlelink 3,411 9,984 5,567 rankedusingthePageRankmethod[27].Thisalgorithm,also Table1. Thenumberofuniqueconceptsineachsample. Themajor- usedbyGoogle,ranksnodesbythenumberoflinkstothem ityofconceptshaveanarticleeitheronlyintheEnglisheditionoronly weightedbythePageRanksofthenodesfromwhichthelinks intheJapaneseedition(en-onlyorja-only),whileasmallernumberof originate. conceptshavearticlesinboththeEnglishandJapaneseeditions(Both). Within the geotag sample, the top-ranked English-only arti- clesweremainlyaboutUSmilitaryfacilities,equipment,and size(inbytes)beforeandafteranedit. Incontrast,thesizes historicbattles,whilethetop-rankedgeotaggedJapanesearti- computedbyWikiTrustandusedinthispaperaredetermined clesincludedavarietyofparks,touristareas,ports/terminals, bythenumberofwordsadded, deleted, changed, ormoved. andashrine,reflectingthatOkinawaisaJapanesetouristhot Newwordsanddeletedwordscontributeonepointeach,re- spot. placement words contribute 0.5 points each, and moving a wordafractionxofthenormalizedpagelength(0

Cross-language Wikipedia Editing of Okinawa, Japan

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