Location: PSH (Professor Stuart Hall Building) - 302,
Goldsmiths, University of London, Building 2
Campus Map Contributors:
- Marc Miquel-Ribé, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
- David Laniado, Eurecat, Spain
This paper studies identity-based motivation in Wikipedia as a drive for editors to act congruently with their cultural identity values by contributing with content related to them. To assess its influence, we developed a computational method to identify articles related to the cultural identities associated to each language and applied it to 40 Wikipedia language editions. The results show that about a quarter of each Wikipedia language edition is dedicated to represent the corresponding cultural identities. The topical coverage of these articles reflects that geography, biographies and culture are the most common themes, although each language shows its idiosyncrasy and other topics are also present. Consistently with the idea that a Cultural Identity is defined in relation to others, as entangled and separated, the majority of these articles remain exclusive to each language. A study of how this content is shared among language editions reveals special links between cultures. The approach and findings presented in this study can help to foster participation and inter-cultural enrichment of Wikipedias. The dataset of articles related to the cultural identity of each language edition is made available for further research.
