Highlighting Entanglement of Cultures via Ranking of Multilingual Wikipedia Articles

How different cultures evaluate a person? Is an important person in one culture is also important in the other culture? We address these questions via ranking of multilingual Wikipedia articles. With three ranking algorithms based on network structure of Wikipedia, we assign ranking to all articles in 9 multilingual editions of Wikipedia and investigate general ranking structure of PageRank, CheiRank and 2DRank. In particular, we focus on articles related to persons, identify top 30 persons for each rank among different editions and analyze distinctions of their distributions over activity fields such as politics, art, science, religion, sport for each edition. We find that local heroes are dominant but also global heroes exist and create an effective network representing entanglement of cultures. The Google matrix analysis of network of cultures shows signs of the Zipf law distribution. This approach allows to examine diversity and shared characteristics of knowledge organization between cultures. The developed computational, data driven approach highlights cultural interconnections in a new perspective.Comment: Published in PLoS ONE (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0074554). Supporting information is available on the same webpag

Interactions of cultures and top people of Wikipedia from ranking of 24 language editions

Wikipedia is a huge global repository of human knowledge, that can be leveraged to investigate interwinements between cultures. With this aim, we apply methods of Markov chains and Google matrix, for the analysis of the hyperlink networks of 24 Wikipedia language editions, and rank all their articles by PageRank, 2DRank and CheiRank algorithms. Using automatic extraction of people names, we obtain the top 100 historical figures, for each edition and for each algorithm. We investigate their spatial, temporal, and gender distributions in dependence of their cultural origins. Our study demonstrates not only the existence of skewness with local figures, mainly recognized only in their own cultures, but also the existence of global historical figures appearing in a large number of editions. By determining the birth time and place of these persons, we perform an analysis of the evolution of such figures through 35 centuries of human history for each language, thus recovering interactions and entanglement of cultures over time. We also obtain the distributions of historical figures over world countries, highlighting geographical aspects of cross-cultural links. Considering historical figures who appear in multiple editions as interactions between cultures, we construct a network of cultures and identify the most influential cultures according to this network.Comment: 32 pages. 10 figures. Submitted for publication. Supporting information is available on http://www.quantware.ups-tlse.fr/QWLIB/topwikipeople

Google matrix analysis of directed networks

In past ten years, modern societies developed enormous communication and social networks. Their classification and information retrieval processing become a formidable task for the society. Due to the rapid growth of World Wide Web, social and communication networks, new mathematical methods have been invented to characterize the properties of these networks on a more detailed and precise level. Various search engines are essentially using such methods. It is highly important to develop new tools to classify and rank enormous amount of network information in a way adapted to internal network structures and characteristics. This review describes the Google matrix analysis of directed complex networks demonstrating its efficiency on various examples including World Wide Web, Wikipedia, software architecture, world trade, social and citation networks, brain neural networks, DNA sequences and Ulam networks. The analytical and numerical matrix methods used in this analysis originate from the fields of Markov chains, quantum chaos and Random Matrix theory.Comment: 56 pages, 58 figures. Missed link added in network example of Fig3

Unpacking the structure of knowledge diffusion in Wikipedia: Local biases, noble prizes and the wisdom of crowds

This paper investigates the diffusion of around 100,000 articles about literary authors in 52 versions of Wikipedia. We studied how Wiki versions replicate articles of authors belonging to a particular linguistic group and we collected findings about the potential mechanisms governing the replication process and its fairness. Results showed that diffusion of articles follows a power law, governed by strong preferences among versions, with a high number of isolated articles only present in one Wikipedia version. We found that the English Wiki has a prominent role in diffusing knowledge. However, results also showed that other Wikipedia versions were fundamental to building a rich global corpus of knowledge. Classical Greek and Latin authors resulted the most replicated set of entries. We found that geographic proximity and linguistic similarity was pivotal to explaining mutual links between Wikis. Finally, despite the presence of preference mechanisms, we found how the relative importance that each Wikipedia versions assigns to the set of authors of each language is significantly correlated with an expert-based ranking built on the outcome of various international literary awards, including the Nobel Prize. Moreover, we showed how Wikipedia exhibits a strong Wisdom of Crowds effect, with the collective opinion of all the Wikipedia versions showing a correlation with the experts higher than any individual Wikipedia version, with a value for Pearson's' r of about 0.9

Mapping Articles on China in Wikipedia: An Inter-Language Semantic Network Analysis

This article describes an inter-language semantic network analysis examining the differences between articles about China in the Chinese and English versions of Wikipedia. It explores the differences in the content of Wikipedia through (a) correlation analysis of semantic networks and (b) the salience of semantic concepts through their network centralities. The results suggest there is high dissimilarity between the semantic content of the English and Chinese versions of articles on China. While both pages focused on government, population, language, character, diplomatic relations, development of the economy, and science and technology, the Chinese-speaking and English-speaking contributors framed the article on China differently—according to dissimilarities in cultures, values, interests, situations, and emotions of different language groups. This research contributes to the literature and understanding of how culture of different language groups influences the process of crowdsourcing knowledge on online collaboration platforms

Capturing the influence of geopolitical ties from Wikipedia with reduced Google matrix

Interactions between countries originate from diverse aspects such as geographic proximity, trade, socio-cultural habits, language, religions, etc. Geopolitics studies the influence of a country’s geographic space on its political power and its relationships with other countries. This work reveals the potential of Wikipedia mining for geopolitical study. Actually, Wikipedia offers solid knowledge and strong correlations among countries by linking web pages together for different types of information (e.g. economical, historical, political, and many others). The major finding of this paper is to show that meaningful results on the influence of country ties can be extracted from the hyperlinked structure of Wikipedia. We leverage a novel stochastic matrix representation of Markov chains of complex directed networks called the reduced Google matrix theory. For a selected small size set of nodes, the reduced Google matrix concentrates direct and indirect links of the million-node sized Wikipedia network into a small Perron-Frobenius matrix keeping the PageRank probabilities of the global Wikipedia network. We perform a novel sensitivity analysis that leverages this reduced Google matrix to characterize the influence of relationships between countries from the global network. We apply this analysis to two chosen sets of countries (i.e. the set of 27 European Union countries and a set of 40 top worldwide countries). We show that with our sensitivity analysis we can exhibit easily very meaningful information on geopolitics from five different Wikipedia editions (English, Arabic, Russian, French and German)

Beyond the Book: Linking Books to Wikipedia

The book translation market is a topic of interest in literary studies, but the reasons why a book is selected for translation are not well understood. The "Beyond the Book" project investigates whether web resources like Wikipedia can be used to establish the level of cultural bias. This work describes the eScience tools used to estimate the cultural appeal of a book: semantic linking is used to identify key words in the text of the book, and afterwards the revision information from corresponding Wikipedia articles is examined to identify countries that generated a more than average amount of contributions to those articles. Comparison between the number of contributions from two countries on the same set of articles may show with which knowledge the contributors are familiar. We assume a lack of contributions from a country may indicate a gap in the knowledge of readers from that country. We assume that a book dealing with that concept could be more exotic and therefore more appealing for certain readers, while others are therefore less interested in the book. An indication of the 'level of exoticness' thus could help a reader/publisher to decide to read/translate the book or not. Experimental results are presented for four selected books from a set of 564 books written in Dutch or translated into Dutch, assessing their potential appeal for a Canadian audience. A qualitative assessment of quantitative results provides insight into named entities that may indicate a high/low cultural bias towards a book

Universe-Cities as Problematic Global Villages continuities and shifts in our academic worlds

Edição: 1st ed. Editoria: Florianópolis: PGET/UFSC; Tubarão: Copiart, 2014. Páginas: 284 p. Língua da publicação: Inglês Referência ABNT: Lambert, José; Iliescu Gheorghiu, Catalina (Eds.). Universe-Cities as Problematic Global Villages continuities and shifts in our academic worlds. 1st ed. Florianópolis: PGET/UFSC; Tubarão: Copiart, 2014. 284 p