Okinawa in Japanese and English Wikipedia

Abstract

This research analyzes edits by foreign-language users in Wikipedia articles about Okinawa, Japan, in the Japanese and English editions of the encyclopedia. Okinawa, home to both English and Japanese speaking users, provides a good case to look at content differences and cross-language editing in a small geographic area on Wikipedia. Consistent with prior work, this research finds large differences in the representations of Okinawa in the content of the two editions. The number of users crossing the language boundary to edit both editions is also extremely small. When users do edit in a non-primary language, they most frequently edit articles that have cross-language (interwiki) links, articles that are edited more by other users, and articles that have more images. Finally, the possible value of edits from foreign-language users and design possibilities to motivate wider contributions from foreign-language users are discussed.

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Citation

Hale, S. A. (2014). Okinawa in Japanese and English Wikipedia. In Extended Abstracts of the 2014 ACM Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM (Toronto, Canada).

@inproceedings{hale-chi2014wiki,
	author = {Hale, Scott A.},
	title = {Okinawa in Japanese and English Wikipedia},
	booktitle = {CHI '14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
	series = {CHI EA '14},
	year = {2014},
	isbn = {978-1-4503-2474-8},
	location = {Toronto, Ontario, Canada},
	pages = {927--932},
	numpages = {6},
	url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2559206.2579413},
	doi = {10.1145/2559206.2579413},
	acmid = {2579413},
	publisher = {ACM},
	address = {New York, NY, USA},
	keywords = {cross-language, information diffusion, information discovery, multilingual, social media, wikipedia},
}

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Related publications

• Hale, S. A. (2015). Cross-language Wikipedia Editing of Okinawa, Japan. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’15, ACM.
• Hale, S. A. (2014). Global Connectivity and Multilinguals in the Twitter Network. In Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’14, ACM.
• Hale, S. A. (2014). Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing. In Proceedings of the 6th Annual ACM Web Science Conference, WebSci ’14, ACM.