Global Wikipedia

International and Cross-Cultural Issues in Online Collaboration

By (author) Pnina Fichman, Noriko Hara

Publication date:

15 May 2014

Length of book:

178 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9780810891012

Dozens of books about Wikipedia are available, but they all focus on the English Wikipedia and assume an Anglo-Saxon perspective, while disregarding cultural and language variability or multi-cultural collaborative efforts. They address the impact of Wikipedia on society, processes of mass knowledge production, and the dynamics of the Wikipedia community. However, none of them focus on Wikipedia’s global features. This lack of attention presents a serious problem because more than 80% of Wikipedia articles are written in languages other than English---in fact, Wikipedia includes articles in 285 languages.

Global Wikipedia: International and Cross-Cultural Issues in Online Collaboration is the first book to address this gap by focusing attention on the global, multilingual, and multicultural aspects of Wikipedia. The editors showcase research on Wikipedia, exploring a wide range of international and cross-cultural issues. Online global collaboration, coordination, and conflict management are examined in this rich socio technical environment.

Special emphases include

International and cross-cultural collaboration;
Intercultural synergy on Wikimedia;
Conflict and collaboration in editing international entries;
Case studies of Chinese, Finnish, French, and Greek Wikipedias; and,
Cross-cultural studies that compare more than one Wikipedia, focusing on content, structures, policies, contributions, interactions, processes, motivations, and challenges.

Introduction

Chapter 1: Immaterial Editors: Bots and Bot Policies Across Global Wikipedia by
Randall Livingstone
Chapter 2: The Most Controversial Topics In Wikipedia: A Multilingual And Geographical Analysis
Taha Yasseri, Anselm Spoerri, Mark Graham, and János Kertész
Chapter 3: Our News, Their Events: A Comparison of Archived Current Events on English and Greek Wikipedia
Jahna Ottenbacher
Chapter 4: Cross-linguistic Neutrality: Wikipedia's Neutral Points of Views from a global perspective
Ewa Callahan
Chapter 5: Gender Gap In Wikipedia Editing: A Cross-Language Comparison
Paolo Massa, Asta Zelenkauskaite
Chapter 6: Knowledge Sharing on Wikimedia Embassies
Pnina Fichman, Noriko Hara
Chapter 7: Constructing local heroes – collaborative narratives of Finnish corporations in Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, Merja Porttikivi
Chapter 8: The political economy of the Chinese copycats of Wikipedia
Gehao Zhang
Chapter 10: Contributing to Wikipedia: A Question of Gender
Hélène Bourdeloie, Michaël Vicente
Index
About the Contributors
About the Editors

Wikipedia articles are written in 285 languages, with 80 percent in languages other than English. This study claims to be the first to examine Wikipedia’s global features, including multicultural collaborative efforts. Topics in the nine essays by academics from a variety of disciplines include the use of software robots, analysis of controversial topics, archived current events, cross-linguistic neutrality, the treatment of gender across several languages, knowledge sharing, and a gender analysis of Wikipedia contributors. Included within these essays are case studies of Chinese, Finnish, French, and Greek Wikipedias. There is . . . use of statistics and charts . . . This information will be new to . . . Wikipedia users. Each essay includes a bibliography, and there is a[n] . . . index.