“Digital Divisions of Labor and Informational Magnetism: Mapping Participation in Wikipedia.” summary

I’ve just Google searched how many people use Wikipedia and the second line reads "The English Wikipedia includes 6,632,882 articles and it averages 556 new articles per day", the article goes on without mentioning facts about the other languages which you can translate to. English is only an official language in 67 out the 195 countries in the world. I live in a developing country with 11 official languages (including English) and I often find it difficult to conduct research on indigenous philosophies due to the lack of available and relevant information. Those who reside in economic peripheries continue to remain behind and unnoticed while reliable information sources fill their repositories with articles curated to support the Core's agenda. On the other hand, most low/middle income households in countries that have low levels of economic development, cannot afford to purchase a computer/laptop, do not have access to the internet or cannot afford data/Wi-Fi and these financial hurdles prevent these individuals from taking part in generating fitting content.

Hypotheses and informed guesses:

1. Gradual development of the periphery will result in translation inclusion. Different Wikipedias that cater for different audiences will create a demand for that specific translation and thus inclusion. The article stated that there are now more than 3 billion Internet users on our planet. The connections afforded to all of those people, in theory, allow for an unprecedented amount of communication and public participation. 2023 statistics show that that number has almost doubled which means different types of people with different views and preferences can create a demand for different Wikipedias.
2. Variety of translation might result in redundance, and this will take away the element of creativity and originality from the author. If the number of registered editors increase so will the number of articles. Because the metrics of registered editors and registered edits are based on the same method and data source, the only explanation of this lowered correlation is differences in the activity levels of registered editors in different countries.
3. Underrepresented groups will have a voice. Some people’s views are not recognized because of 'Information Magnetism '. Different Wikipedias can serve a good purpose in assisting with their recognition by letting them take part. This article shows that the relative democratization of the Internet has not brought about a concurrent democratization of voice and participation. Despite the fact that it is widely used around the world, Wikipedia is characterized by highly uneven geographies of participation.
4. Schools often give assignments which require research and translation, while one Wikipedia states a version of events, another Wikipedia might give a slightly different one which to some extent will distort the truth because of how the research was conducted. Although most of our work is conducted at the national level, we sometimes complement claims made at that fine-grained scale with more generalized assertions at the level of world regions.

After reading the above article, I have deduced the following hypotheses and informed guesses. The article was enlightening and has encouraged me to research further about ‘Information Magnetism’. Indeed, the world is more complex than we can think however, this is just the perspective of Graham, Straumann, Hogan. The world is constantly evolving, and statistics are subject to change. In this case data was collected from 120 countries where 500 most visited websites were derived but we might have a different outcome if we conducted the same research with the same subjects.

Digital Division of labour and informational magnetism: Mapping participation in Wikipedia.
In this article, the patterns of participation in Wikipedia are examined, along with the contribution of broadband accessibility to those patterns. The authors found that, despite Wikipedia's ubiquitous use, there are considerable regional disparities in participation, with involvement from the world's economically disadvantaged regions typically focusing on updating about world's cores then instead of their own local regions. The authors propose a non-linear link involving broadband access and engagement, with the availability available broadband internet being a crucial determinant of participation on Wikipedia. In particular, the power of broadband access to favourably effect participation keeps growing when a country approaches connectivity numbers above 450,000 broadband Internet connections. Overall, the results point to an informational magnetism that is cast by the world's economic cores, which makes it difficult to reconfigure networks and hierarchies of knowledge production.

Hypothesis and informed guesses:

• Hypothesis 1: The number and types of articles that get translated across the various Wikipedia versions will differ significantly, with more translation taking place between language that are spoken in regions that have lots of broadband internet access. Taking an excerpt from the research, it can be said that "our regression analysis demonstrates that the accessibility of broadband is a clear determinant in the inclination of people to contribute on Wikipedia. “My educated assumption is that the availability of broadband will play a significant role in determining the patterns of translating between Wikipedia editions in different languages, with more translation taking place between languages in areas with high broadband connectivity.

• Hypothesis 2: The global economic structure will be reflected in the patterns of translation across Wikipedia's many language editions, with entries about subjects important to the economic cores getting converted more frequently than those about subjects exclusive to the periphery. The fact that involvement from the world's economic peripheral areas tends to concentrate on editing about the world's centres rather than their own local areas complicates the situation. With more pages on issues that are pertinent to the economic cores getting translated than articles about themes that are particular to peripheral regions, Wikipedia's translation trends across different language versions are anticipated to take into account the global economic hierarchy.

• Hypothesis 3: involvement from the world's economically disadvantaged regions primarily focuses on editing about the global centres rather than their own local areas. This might be as a result of an informational magnetic emitted by the world's economic centres, which creates virtuous and vicious cycles and makes it challenging to reorganize knowledge production networks and hierarchies. These trends might be the result of editors favouring articles about regions with stronger economies over those regarding underrepresented or marginalized places. These patterns may also help to maintain dominant narratives in the creation of knowledge and perpetuate current power dynamics.

Based on the paper "Digital Divisions of Labor and Informational Magnetism: Mapping Participation in Wikipedia" by Graham, Straumann, and Hogan (2015), here are some hypotheses and informed guesses on the patterns that might be observed in a dataset of translations between different Wikipedias:

• Translations are more likely to occur between Wikipedias with similar levels of participation: The paper argues that "participation tends to be concentrated among a small number of highly active contributors", which can lead to "informational magnetism" that pulls in more contributors to the most popular Wikipedias. This suggests that translations are more likely to occur between Wikipedias that have a similar level of participation, as they are more likely to have a similar pool of highly active contributors.
• Translations are more likely to occur between Wikipedias with a shared cultural or linguistic background: The paper notes that "Wikipedia content and contributors tend to reflect cultural and linguistic boundaries", and that there are "significant differences in participation and editing behavior across languages and cultures". This suggests that translations are more likely to occur between Wikipedias that share a cultural or linguistic background, as contributors from these communities are more likely to be interested in content from other communities that are similar to their own.
• Translations are more likely to occur between Wikipedias with similar article topics: The paper notes that "Wikipedia content tends to be highly specific and focused", and that "participation varies significantly by article topic". This suggests that translations are more likely to occur between Wikipedias that have similar article topics, as contributors who are interested in a particular topic are more likely to be interested in content from other Wikipedias that cover the same topic.
• Translations are more likely to occur from larger to smaller Wikipedias: The paper notes that "participation tends to be highly concentrated among a small number of highly active contributors", and that "larger language editions have more editors, more active editors, more administrators, and more bureaucrats than smaller language editions". This suggests that translations are more likely to occur from larger to smaller Wikipedias, as larger Wikipedias are more likely to have a pool of highly active contributors who are interested in translating content to smaller Wikipedias.
• Translations are more likely to occur for high-quality articles: The paper notes that "Wikipedia quality tends to vary across language editions", and that "there is significant variation in the accuracy and completeness of Wikipedia articles across languages". This suggests that translations are more likely to occur for high-quality articles, as contributors are more likely to be interested in translating content that is accurate and complete.

Overall, these hypotheses suggest that translations between different Wikipedias are influenced by a variety of factors, including participation levels, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, article topics, and article quality.

Hello @awight ,@Simulo, @srishakatux, please I would appreciate a review and feedback. Thank you😀

In T331199#8674099, @Abhishek02bhardwaj wrote:

[...] geographies of participation and voice on the English-language version of Wikipedia [....] North America and Europe commit more than they receive into their territories.

This is relevant to our project, and has the same sign as the effect we're seeing. My understanding of the article is also that people in the so-called periphery are committing to English- and French-language Wikipedias proportionally more than to regional language wikis—but this effect if extrapolated to translation would have the opposite sign: this would suggest that translators might tend to translate into former colonial languages.

In T331199#8674111, @Abhishek02bhardwaj wrote:

On average, countries with medium numbers of broadband Internet connections commit fewer edits than expected. The same trend is expected when we think of translations [...]

This would be a very interesting research question and shouldn't be too difficult to calculate.

[...] languages which are being spoken in countries and regions having better broadband connectivity have more people interested in consuming information.

The twist is, when multiple languages are spoken the patterns of consuming and committing are biased towards particular languages with colonial legacies, eg. being for a time the enforced language of education and so on.

[...] if we could find the language specific GER data (i.e. Gross Enrollment Ration in a specific language education) then we might be able to get an insight of relation between GER in a language and Translations in that language.

Yes! Something like finding the language of education in a region. It might also be relevant to know the languages which are spoken but are not represented in higher education, these might have some kind of "negative magnetism" for Wikipedia editors and translators because of caste associations. This seems like a hard problem, but I imagine could be analyzed for a small area.

In T331199#8674246, @Anshika_bhatt_20 wrote:

True, "participation in Wikipedia is highly uneven" and this problem is reflected and magnified on many levels. There has been a running debate on the question since at least 2006 (notably beginning with an exchange between Aaron Swartz and Jimmy Wales, "Who writes Wikipedia?") but it's worth mentioning that this hasn't been resolved conclusively, as far as I know. This analysis gets into some of the challenges to proving that certain editors or demographics are contributing a given percentage of the content. Another related fact worth mentioning is that the ratio of "policy" and talk page editing to content editing has been increasing over time.

The lens provided by Hypothesis 1 feels like an important contribution to the discussion: translation skills are not the same as being multilingual, and a small group is going to be doing this work. The designers of the Content Translation tool have made intentional affordances to reduce the needed technical proficiency by including a visual editor and doing some automatic transformation of wikitext templates, but there are still rough edges which require translators to be knowledgeable of specific characteristics (style, citation norms, templates...) of both the source and target wikis.

As a side note, it's interesting what shape the selection for multilingualism takes—for example, there are 3x as many second-language speakers of English as first-language speakers. I would make a guess with no evidence, that many people will feel more comfortable writing in their first language and reading (translating from) their second language.

Translators will need to be aware of these issues and make changes in their translations.

I'm not sure about this, I would like to learn more—it seems like a question that could be answered by including in a survey to translators? My assumption would be that translators avoid making any factual corrections beyond replacing citations with same-language sources, but maybe this is an assumption I'm transferring from the outside world where a translator is expected to translate "accurately" which means even translating a mistake, in the extreme case. It would make sense if wikis work differently.

What you describe in Hypothesis 3 could be related to hegemonic culture. Generally there are large and two-directional culture gaps between different language wikis as can be seen in the Diversity Observatory (in other words, English is not a superset of all content), but if a few dominant languages cover content from a homogenous perspective then I can see the effect you’re describing causing this singularizing content to be replicated exponentially throughout wikis, due to a lack of alternatives.

In T331199#8675043, @Olamide_Oladipo wrote [...]

I didn’t catch that “Digital Divisions of Labor” is based on a study of English, Arabic, and Catalan—what I see claimed is that “Our set of articles begins with Wikipedia’s inception in 2001 and continues to 3 February 2013, containing articles from forty-four language versions of Wikipedia.”

It sounds almost as if there’s some crossover coming from the paper “Mapping Wikipedia’s Geolinguistic Contours” (link)? Of course it's great to include other papers as well but please link the sources so that we can follow along!

In T331199#8675175, @Chinmaychahar wrote:

Agreed that “a large number of editors make only a few edits and quickly drop out” is a good summary of Wikipedia’s huge problem with editor retention. An individual having the desire to continue working on Wikipedia even after encountering large technical and social obstacles is already a major selection bias.

• The authors also found that the articles edited by core editors tend to receive more attention and become more popular than those edited by peripheral editors.

I do start to wonder whether the “attention” mentioned in the study can really be treated as an aggregate quantity for an article, or if there are narrower silos outside of which the attention given doesn’t matter. For example, military history is a highly active topic on many Wikipedias, but I imagine that the people interested in reading these articles are already drawn to the subject matter, and conversely people not interested in military history are going to be unaffected by the informational magnetism of that topic, regardless of how this effect causes an increase in article quality. In other words, since there's no algorithm or trend magnifier pulling people towards certain topics, perhaps the informational magnetism is being exerted along independent edges according to topic?

• Core translators will have similar demographic characteristics to core editors

Looks like an important question to answer, possibly out of scope of this project however. There have been a few notorious cases of near-entire wikis in indigenous languages being written by armchair students of the language, from Western countries. But I hope these are outliers and not the norm. Do you have thoughts about which demographics pertain to the question of language pair? It feels like a particularly thorny question, since the main individual characteristic we're looking at would be language skills, and the possible hidden variables motivating a person to choose one direction/language or another (eg. colonial mindset, post-colonial cultural context, etc.) could just as well apply to almost any demographic.

In T331199#8675474, @Adedolapooye wrote:

Location where it was tested is more inclined to a certain language translation which is why the language are unevenly distributed

I don’t quite get this, maybe you can elaborate? The study here should have covered the whole globe and analyzed 44 languages of Wikipedia, although it does support your point that geography influences choice of language for reading and writing. The Content Translation tool is available on all Wikipedias at the moment, but the roll-out was probably incremental and the configurations of eg. available machine translation vary widely (one of the quantitative things we hope to understand with this project!).

Regarding Hypothesis 2, yeah this reminds me of the liberal call to “vote with your dollars”, which is totally undemocratic since the wide range of disposable income breaks the “one person, one vote” principle.

Hypothesis 4- more focus on the global world than local regions leading to informational magnetism

I would love to hear any more thoughts you have about Hypothesis 4, for example any theories about why this seems to be the case?

In T331199#8719120, @awight wrote:

In T331199#8674246, @Anshika_bhatt_20 wrote:

True, "participation in Wikipedia is highly uneven" and this problem is reflected and magnified on many levels. There has been a running debate on the question since at least 2006 (notably beginning with an exchange between Aaron Swartz and Jimmy Wales, "Who writes Wikipedia?") but it's worth mentioning that this hasn't been resolved conclusively, as far as I know. This analysis gets into some of the challenges to proving that certain editors or demographics are contributing a given percentage of the content. Another related fact worth mentioning is that the ratio of "policy" and talk page editing to content editing has been increasing over time.

The lens provided by Hypothesis 1 feels like an important contribution to the discussion: translation skills are not the same as being multilingual, and a small group is going to be doing this work. The designers of the Content Translation tool have made intentional affordances to reduce the needed technical proficiency by including a visual editor and doing some automatic transformation of wikitext templates, but there are still rough edges which require translators to be knowledgeable of specific characteristics (style, citation norms, templates...) of both the source and target wikis.

As a side note, it's interesting what shape the selection for multilingualism takes—for example, there are 3x as many second-language speakers of English as first-language speakers. I would make a guess with no evidence, that many people will feel more comfortable writing in their first language and reading (translating from) their second language.

Translators will need to be aware of these issues and make changes in their translations.

I'm not sure about this, I would like to learn more—it seems like a question that could be answered by including in a survey to translators? My assumption would be that translators avoid making any factual corrections beyond replacing citations with same-language sources, but maybe this is an assumption I'm transferring from the outside world where a translator is expected to translate "accurately" which means even translating a mistake, in the extreme case. It would make sense if wikis work differently.

What you describe in Hypothesis 3 could be related to hegemonic culture. Generally there are large and two-directional culture gaps between different language wikis as can be seen in the Diversity Observatory (in other words, English is not a superset of all content), but if a few dominant languages cover content from a homogenous perspective then I can see the effect you’re describing causing this singularizing content to be replicated exponentially throughout wikis, due to a lack of alternatives.

@awight Thank you for sharing your thoughts on my hypothesis. I appreciate your insight and agree that the uneven participation in Wikipedia can be a challenging issue to address. Additionally, your explanation of the Content Translation tool's intentional affordances and rough edges provides valuable context for understanding the unique skills and knowledge required of translators.
also, I agree that further research would be helpful in understanding how translators approach factual corrections in their translations. However, based on my initial review of the paper, I hypothesize that translators may avoid making factual corrections beyond replacing citations with same-language sources. This is because of the expectation of accuracy in translation, which may require translators to maintain the original author's intent and message, even if there are factual errors. But, as you mentioned, the context of wikis may affect this expectation. I will continue to explore this topic further and welcome any additional insights or resources you may have.
I appreciate the insight into the concept of hegemonic culture and how it may relate to my hypothesis. I will definitely look into this further to see if it can provide additional support or nuance to my hypothesis.

In response to your comment on my hypotheses, I would like to clarify that I do try to add specific examples and evidence from relevant paper to support my hypotheses and informed guesses. I believe that this approach can help strengthen the validity of my claims and contribute to a more thorough analysis.
Additionally, I found your comments on the challenges of participation in Wikipedia to be particularly informative, and I will do my best to consider those challenges in my analysis moving forward.

Once again, thank you for your feedback and guidance. I will keep these insights in mind as I continue working on my project.

Here is my brief summary of this paper with specific examples and evidence from the paper. If you have any other suggestions on how I can improve it, please let me know. I am open to constructive criticism and will work diligently to incorporate any changes you suggest. Thank you for your time and guidance.

Digital Division of labor and informational magnetism: Mapping participation in Wikipedia.

In their 2015 paper “Digital Divisions of labor and informational magnetism: mapping participation in Wikipedia,” Graham, Straumann, and hogan explore the ways in which participation in Wikipedia is shaped and highly influenced by digital divisions of labor and the informational magnetism of certain topics.
The digital division of labor refers to the unequal distribution of labor and skills required for digital work, particularly in the online environment. It can result in unequal access to and control over digital resources. Similarly “Informational magnetism” refers to the phenomena where certain individuals or groups have a disproportionate amount of influence or power in online communities, such as Wikipedia. As it is referred to the ability of certain articles or topics to gain more attention and contribution than others leading to unequal distribution of labor and contributions in the online community.
Also, they use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the distribution of editors across language versions of Wikipedia.
The authors find that participation in Wikipedia is highly uneven, with a small group of highly active editors responsible for a disproportionate amount of content creation. This editor tends to concentrate their editing activity around certain topics. They also find that there is a significant degree of information magnetism, with certain articles attracting a great deal of attention and activity while others are largely neglected.
Based on the paper “Digital division of labor and informational magnetism: mapping participation in Wikipedia,” . We can expect to see certain patterns in a dataset of translations between different Wikipedias. There are several potential implications for translators.
• Hypothesis 1
Unequal distribution of contribution: As the study found in the paper a small number of editors were responsible for the majority of articles and topics on Wikipedia, For example, in the English Wikipedia, 524 editors were responsible for half of all the edits made to articles, while the top 2,000 editors were responsible for 73% of all edits. (p. 117)
we might expect to see that certain language communities have a higher chance of participation in Wikipedia and are therefore more likely to contribute translations. This suggests that there may be a similar concentration of translation work among a small group of translators. For example, the top five language communities on Wikipedia (English, German, French, Spanish, and Russian) account for over 70% of all Wikipedia articles. (p. 124)
Informed guess: as we all know translation requires a good level of proficiency and understanding of both the content and targeted languages, it is highly possible that only a small group of individuals who are bilingual will be able to contribute in the translation of Wikipedia content, similarly to the small group of highly active editors based on what we know from the paper. We can guess translation requires proficiency in two languages, only a small group of people who know more than one language will be able to translate. (p. 124)

• Hypothesis 2
Informational magnetism: The distribution of contribution may be influenced by “Informational magnetism”. As the author said “a small number of contributors to Wikipedia have a large impact on its content. The presence of informational magnetism may impact the accuracy and quality of translations. Because of that the result may be biased or inaccurate in articles. Translators will need to be aware of these issues and make changes in their translations. For example, the top 1% of editors were responsible for 44% of all the edits made to articles. (p. 117).
The contributions of high–profile editors were more likely to be adopted by other editors. It also means high–profile translators may have a disproportionate impact on the translation community, and their work may be more likely to be recognized and adopted by others. The article that has already been translated extensively between different Wikipedias are more likely to attract further translation activity. For example, the paper mentions a study that found that articles with high-quality translations were more likely to be adopted by other editors. (p. 124)
Informed guess: if an article has already been translated extensively, it is likely more possible that it has received a lot of attention and is, therefore, more likely to be of high quality making it more attractive for potential translators. For example, the paper notes that English Wikipedia articles are more likely to be translated into other languages than vice versa and that articles on popular topics such as geography and history are more likely to be translated. (p. 123-124)

• Hypothesis 3
Overlap in content: There is a high degree of overlap in topics covered and content produced in different language versions of Wikipedia may make it more likely for translators to engage in translation activities between these versions. As the author notes that “Wikipedia is a translingual project with topics, content, and editors that cross national and linguistic borders”. This overlap in the content may be driven by several factors such as the availability of reliable sources, cross-language collaboration, global events, and trends. The paper notes that Wikipedia is a translingual project with topics, content, and editors that cross national and linguistic borders. For example, the paper mentions that editors from different language communities often collaborate on the same article. (p. 121)

Informed guess: if certain articles on the same topic may have similar content across different language versions of Wikipedia, this collaboration may result in the creation of similar articles across different language versions of Wikipedia. This overlap may lead to an increased likelihood of translation activity between these versions. For example, the paper notes that articles on popular topics such as geography and history are often translated between different language versions of Wikipedia. (p. 123-124)

In summary, the uneven distribution of contributions and the concentration of editing activity around certain topics suggests that certain language versions of Wikipedia may have a higher concentration of translation work than others. This also means that translators' works on Wikipedia may face a challenge in finding content to translate. Translators may also need to pay attention to the contribution of high–profile editors, who are more likely to have a significant impact on the content of Wikipedia and may influence the translations of others. The high degree of overlap in topics covered and content produced in different language versions of Wikipedia may provide opportunities for translators to engage in translation activities between these versions. This can also result in similar the creation of articles across different language versions of Wikipedia, and translators may be able to contribute by translating these articles into their respective languages.

Hello, @awight Thank you very much for your valuable feedback.

This is relevant to our project, and has the same sign as the effect we're seeing. My understanding of the article is also that people in the so-called periphery are committing to English- and French-language Wikipedias proportionally more than to regional language wikis—but this effect if extrapolated to translation would have the opposite sign: this would suggest that translators might tend to translate into former colonial languages.

I got a very similar result to this while doing the task #T331204 where we had to produce flow diagrams illustrating translation imbalances. One important noteworthy thing that I observed while producing those diagrams was that when I removed all the rows with English as source language, the largest number of lines were still pointing to English. Which I believe means that English is also the most popular target language among the other languages. And when I removed English from both the target language and source language, ru (which I think is the short for Russian) was the most popular language along with fr and es, which again gives a strong back to our hypothesis.

In T331199#8679183, @Shaily066 wrote:

These seem like reasonable hypotheses about editing, but how would you say the paper might apply to translation between languages?

In T331199#8680377, @Ebere_O wrote:

• Data was collected from 120 countries where 500 most visited websites were derived.

I see this comes from note (5), but it should be mentioned that this data actually appears in a different paper (Alexa 2013), and the citation is only used to demonstrate that Wikipedia is a top website in 95% of the world by readership. The "Digital Division of Labor" paper is not restricted to 120 countries, but is restricted to 44 languages and also restricted to articles that included embedded geocoding. As you point out in your summary, wide readership makes the uneven geography of contributions even more surprising.

One third of the population of users are women, however, only 13% of the fraction are women. An increase in the fraction of women that participate would bring about some changes in the overall scenario.

It certainly would! Here's an entry point into more about the gender gap on Wikipedia in case it's of interest.

The issue of participation leading to content shift feels like it might apply to the question of translation as well. Do you want to share any more thoughts about how the concepts here might apply to translation specifically?

In T331199#8681064, @Ben.ochy wrote:

They discover that whereas pages on science and technology are more likely to be modified by administrators and bots, articles on popular culture and current events receive more contributions from non-administrator individuals.

This seems possible, but this exact claim is not made in the paper and I wasn't able to find evidence in other scholarship either. Do you have a reference? You give a quote but I don't see it in the source article...

[...] the level of involvement and collaboration amongst various language Wikipedias may vary.

I hadn't thought about it in this way, but there's actually an interesting question about individual vs. collaborative work here: Is translation solitary work? I don't know of any mechanisms for group collaboration across wiki languages, now I'll keep an eye out for this possibility.

In T331199#8682251, @Successoghogho wrote:

I'm concerned that I sent people to the wrong paper? Can you take a screenshot of the source for some of these quotes? I don't see where they come from in the "Digital Divisions of Labor" study linked from the task description.

In T331199#8684755, @Ahn-nath wrote:

[...] how it prevents Wikipedia from achieving its ambition to democratize content.

Sorry to interrupt this excellent summary by going off on a tangential point, but we should be clear that Wikipedia has tremendous potential to democratize content but as is pointed out in the article it is not being fully realized. Crucially to why this is the case, please note that the Wikimedia Foundation's vision and mission statements don't show any explicit commitment to democracy or equality so I would hesitate to call either an "ambition" of the organization which is best positioned to focus global efforts. The vision statement is about individuals (rather than communities) freely (invoking libertarianism more than anything else) share (ambiguous agency) in the sum of knowledge (a dangerous, neoliberal formulation really). The mission statement is about making the content available under a free license globally.

It would be quite nice if we had a solid commitment to democratization and equality of participation!

[...] broadband connection [is the best predictor of] participation on Wikipedia

(Also surprising that this is a better predictor than wealth! I would have assumed that broadband is just a proxy variable for wealth and education, but the evidence disagrees with me.)

• Large amounts of geospatial content do not prevent editors from engaging in already rich collections. In fact, the opposite seems to be true, with cases in which the Global North not only has more contributions, on average, but can be “net importing areas” whereas countries in the Global South, with a much lower reception, can have a tendency to be “net exporting areas.”

Yes! I hadn't looked at it that way until you mention, but this is the reverse of the effect we see in translation where one might otherwise assume that the bigger language editions are saturated and everything important has been written about. So if there is an informational magnetism at play with translation, it might pertain more to the source material than the target wiki.

• How the disproportionate participation and overall involvement in certain regions have the ability to define, not only what type of content is mostly available (e.g, dominate or influence the consumption of smaller countries), but also define what (perspective) those countries have available for and about themselves (when they net-export).

A truly scary effect.

• That Wikipedia, in spite of its internal ecosystem, is vulnerable to the availability and “network power”

If you have more thoughts to share about this internal ecosystem, I'm curious. I have a hard time identifying any specific mechanisms which might counteract the dominating effects, if anything I suspect that the only layer of protection might literally be the language barrier.

• Regions with access to the minimum required criteria to make contributions and translations are more likely to do so and they tend to be from countries of the larger languages.

What would we need to test this hypothesis? Perhaps an estimated geolocation of translators similar to what done in the paper?

• Contributors may prefer to translate and update as opposed to creating content from scratch because of the required effort and as a consequence, they can be naturally drawn to highly available content.

This is an interesting economic lens--maybe leading to a question we could ask in a survey (eg. "how often do you edit articles when not translating", or "do you view translation as easier or harder than writing a new article from scratch")?

Certain factors such as how “easy” it is to make a translation as well as translators available for specific pairs may also be relevant.

The data scraped from machine-translation configuration might give us a way to verify this theory. How is the popularity of a language pair affected by the availability, quality, and ease of integration of automatic translation?

Whether one language or another is perceived as "important" etc. could also be included a translator survey, I think.

In T331199#8685253, @2023_ wrote:

2. Different language communities will have different patterns of participation and division of labor.

This is established in https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Diversity_Observatory and promisingly, the gaps are mutual meaning that bigger editions are not simply a sum of everything else, but are lacking in topics with strong coverage in other languages.

In T331199#8685564, @JaisAkansha wrote:

Anasuya Sengupta

Correction: she was not an author on this paper, somehow her name slipped into the place where the third author Ralph K. Straumann should be. But I'm sure she's interested in this topic :-)

Where are the quotes from?

Researchers from a number of different universities collaborated on a study titled "Digital Divisions of Labor and Informational Magnetism: Mapping Participation in Wikipedia." The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of the labor and participation patterns of contributors to Wikipedia, which is one of the most popular online encyclopedias. The research investigates the contributions of over 4,000 editors to the development and upkeep of the English-language Wikipedia website by compiling data from a variety of sources, such as Wikipedia's public data dump, user pages, and contributions history.

The authors of the study first analyze the types and frequency of activities done by Wikipedia editors, classifying them into various categories such as creating articles, editing articles, and patrolling vandalism. They also examine whether different types of activities are done by different groups of editors, which reveals a division of labor between users who are more likely to create new articles and those who focus on editing and improving existing ones.

The study also reveals the existence of a small group of highly active contributors who are responsible for the majority of Wikipedia's edits, with the top 1% of contributors accounting for nearly 50% of all edits. In contrast, the majority of contributors make only a few edits, and many only edit articles briefly before disappearing.

The researchers also conduct an analysis of the social networks of those who contribute to Wikipedia. This analysis reveals that editors have a tendency to form clusters around specific topics of interest, with certain topics attracting a greater number of contributors than others. Finally, "informational magnets," editors who garner more attention for their edits and contributions due to their extensive knowledge and involvement across a wide range of topics, are investigated in this study.

Overall, the study provides a thorough analysis of the patterns of labor and participation among Wikipedia contributors, illuminating the existence of divisions of labor, social networks, and the importance of highly active and expert contributors to the success of the platform.

In T331199#8685789, @Isi_Irabor wrote:

Hello, good evening. I have read the paper and my contribution is documented below in the google doc. Please tell me what you think and give feedback, thank you @Simulo @awight

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nGi4hwoACZePUBkadYcSeN0XReupkOJzwt8Ccuu1pUU/edit?usp=sharing

Good day, Please I would really love feedback on my review and the guesses i made from the article. Thank you @awight @Simulo

Digital Divisions of Labor and Informational Magnetism: Mapping Participation in Wikipedia

The abstract discusses the phenomenon of digital divisions of labor and informational magnetism in the context of participation in Wikipedia. The article examines how participation in online communities is shaped by social and economic factors, and how these factors contribute to the production of knowledge and the formation of hierarchies within online communities.

Drawing on data, the authors map out the distribution of contributions made by editors across different language versions of the site. They find that a small percentage of editors are responsible for a large proportion of the content on the site, and that these editors tend to be more highly educated and from countries with higher levels of economic development.

The authors also examine the phenomenon of informational magnetism, which refers to the tendency of certain topics and articles to attract more attention and editing activity than others. They find that articles on topics related to science, technology, and popular culture tend to attract more attention and editing activity than articles on other topics.

Overall, this article contributes to our understanding of how social and economic factors shape participation in online communities and the production of knowledge on the internet. It also highlights the need for greater diversity and inclusivity in online communities to ensure that all voices are heard and all perspectives are represented.

Kindly review my abstract @Simulo @awight

OUTREACHY TOPIC SUMMARY

Graham, Straumann, and Hogan's (2015) article, "Digital Divisions of Labor and Informational Magnetism: Mapping Participation in Wikipedia," investigates the division of labor and information flow within the English and Spanish versions of Wikipedia. Using data from over two million article talk pages, the authors reveal the existence of power-law distributions in user participation and information flow, with a small number of highly active users contributing most of the content and moderating discussions.
The authors also note the existence of "informational magnetism," whereby highly visible and influential topics attract a disproportionate amount of attention and editing activity, leading to a concentration of content in certain areas of the encyclopedia. This phenomenon results in what the authors call a "spiky" geographic distribution of content, with certain regions of the encyclopedia containing much more information than others.
Based on this paper, we might expect to see similar patterns in a dataset of translations between different Wikipedias. Here are some hypotheses and informed guesses, anchored with quotes from the paper:

1. Power-law distributions of user participation and content creation: We might expect to see a small number of highly active users contributing most of the translated content across different language versions of Wikipedia, as well as a long tail of less active contributors.
2. Informational magnetism: We might expect to see certain topics attracting a disproportionate amount of attention and editing activity across different language versions of Wikipedia. For example, highly visible and influential topics in one language might attract a lot of translation activity, resulting in a concentration of content in certain areas of the encyclopedia.
3. Spiky geographic distribution of content: We might expect to see certain regions of the encyclopedia containing much more translated content than others, leading to a "spiky" geographic distribution of content similar to what the authors observed in the English and Spanish Wikipedias.

Overall, these hypotheses suggest that we would see similar patterns of labor division and information flow in a dataset of translations between different language versions of Wikipedia, as we see in the original dataset analyzed by Graham, Straumann, and Hogan (2015).
The most frequently translated languages are likely to be English, followed by other European languages such as Spanish, French, and German. This is based on the authors' observation that "Wikipedia is available in more than 300 languages, but a small number of languages, such as English, German, French, and Spanish, dominate the encyclopedia"
The number of translations between two languages is likely to be influenced by factors such as geographic proximity, linguistic similarity, and historical ties between the countries where those languages are spoken. This is suggested by the authors' statement that "there is a positive correlation between the geographical proximity of two languages and the number of translations between them"
There may be differences in the translation patterns between different language families. For example, the authors note that "some language families such as the Romance or the Slavic ones show a more complex network of translations"
Translations are likely to be more common from larger to smaller Wikipedias. This is supported by the authors' observation that "large Wikipedias, such as English or French, have a higher number of translations than small Wikipedias, such as Maltese or Yoruba"
The availability of bilingual speakers may influence translation patterns. The authors note that "in some countries, the linguistic diversity is high, and multilingualism is common, which facilitates translations between languages"
The number of translations may increase over time, as the number of articles in a Wikipedia grows. This is suggested by the authors' statement that "the number of translations in a given year is positively correlated with the number of articles"
The most frequently translated articles may be related to common topics or events that are of interest to people across different cultures and languages. This is hinted at by the authors' observation that "translations are especially frequent in articles dealing with events that have a global impact or concern universal topics, such as wars, famous people, or natural disasters"
There may be differences in translation patterns depending on the purpose of the translation (e.g., for research or personal interest). The authors note that "translations are made by various types of users, such as researchers, hobbyists, or professional translators"
There may be differences in translation patterns depending on the level of collaboration between different language communities. The authors note that "translations can contribute to a greater intercultural dialogue and understanding between different linguistic communities"

@awight @Simulo

Digital Divisions of Labour and Informational Magnetism: Mapping Participation in Wikipedia

In this 2015 paper “Digital Divisions of labor and informational magnetism: mapping participation in Wikipedia,” done by Graham, Straumann, and Hogan they attempt to explore the ways in which participation, specifically contribution in Wikipedia is shaped and possibly skewed by digital divisions of labor and the informational magnetism.

In summary, they set out to decipher the geographies of participation, what factors explain the uneven geographies and who are the majority contributors in Wikipedia. In order to be able to align their findings to the hypotheses that will be later stated, the data I used from this paper was focused on the global south which according to the authors has the least representation, if any in many instances.

As a baseline, it should be noted that over one hundred million hours of labour have gone into writing over thirty million articles in close to three hundred languages, but the author argues that there are distinct geographies of power and voice when it comes to contribution and participation. The authors obtained data to answer : the origin of edits and the geographic edits of these articles . Their findings were as follows ;

• For edits made between 2007 -2012, the top 20 countries with most edits, USA, Germany , UK and France were at the top and only Brazil, Israel and Mexico were not in the global core. None are in Sub Saharan Africa.
• Among the 50 countries with the fewest edits, 22 of them (44%) are in Sub- Saharan Africa and a total of 6 (12%) in Europe, Oceania and North America combined.
• As at 2012, the highest number of committed edits were recorded overwhelmingly in Europe and again, none in Latin America, Caribbean, Asia and Sub Sharan Africa.
• Most countries in Sub Saharan Africa receive a small amount of edits from within the region which would be less without the outlier effects of South Africa, Rwanda, Zimbabwe , Mauritius and Uganda.

Based on the above data, here are some hypotheses on how this data could potentially affect translators:

Countries that are home to large blocks of editors have the ability to dominate the production of knowledge about smaller countries.

The more the contributors in a certain language or area for example the English Wikipedia that is dominated by the global core, the higher the chances of their information gaining traction and side lining other wikipedias.
Hypothesis 1:
If the geographical participation gap remains significant, we as the global south will keep having less representation meaning even the scarce knowledge and information will be defined by others and translators may face challenges in finding reliable sources of information on certain topics related to a specific region or country that is not well represented on Wikipedia. This could make it harder for them to accurately translate content related to that region or country and into their local languages.

Peer-production affords voice to the three billion connected people on our planet in principle. But in practice, we see how existing inequalities and imbalances don’t just make places invisible, but also suffocate certain voices and perspectives.

Translations are often dependent on the availability and quality of information in the source language as well as bi- lingual capabilities. With reference to the above and an article on Whose Knowledge, it all boils down to notability. Wikipedians say that notability is not determined by a person’s fame, importance, or meaningful contributions to humanity, but only whether significant independent coverage in multiple reliable sources exists. The same applies to the availability of articles in non dominant languages for translation .
Hypothesis 2:
Underrepresentation will continue to drown the cultures and perspectives of the voices in Africa based on the topics which are popular for translation. For example the English Wikipedia covers more broader topics such as global warming while the most common topics in the Swahili wikipedia include their rich history and cultures. Therefore if a particular language is predominantly spoken in a region that is not well represented on Wikipedia for example the Sub Saharan, there may not be sufficient content in that language available for translation. Currently, the most spoken language in Africa is Swahili with approximately 100-150 million speakers but with 77,000 articles only as of March 2023.

Evidently, there has been some efforts by Wikipedia to try and close these geographical gaps from initiatives by Wiki Loves Africa like WikiAfrica which is in support of African projects on Wikipedia. We also have more initiatives coming up like Afripedia
At the same time, this begs the question, are translators open to contributing and making improvements to increase their representation or are they working towards creating their own spaces where they direct and create the narrative that suits and includes them and if so what are these spaces? Has this gap created a challenge or an opportunity for growth in Wikipedia?
As the importance of diversity and inclusion continues to be recognized, we may see greater efforts to address the geographical participation gap in a way that promotes more equitable representation. This could include targeted outreach to underrepresented communities and efforts to promote the use of less dominant languages on Wikipedia. We have seen organizations like Whose Knowledge coming up and collaborating with translators in order to have their voice heard and language represented in Wikipedia.
On the flip side we are also seeing the increase in use of Machine translation, which may not provide one hundred percent accuracy but is an attempt at bridging the language gaps.
Hypothesis 3:
It's possible that these gaps will encourage the emergence of new translation hubs in regions that currently have a lower level of participation. For example The Localization Lab that currently has more that seven thousand contributors working on 220 underrepresented languages.

In my opinion to address the geographical representation gap, there are opportunities for Wikipedia to collaborate with other organizations and communities that have a similar mission to promote . This will be a way of encouraging more translators from the global south to translate and at the same time edit information from their region. Ultimately, a needs assessment will be essential in order to find out all the relevant information such as the key interests of the people in the south, who are the major contributors and what do they write about, what kind of incentives would attract more editors for wikipedia.

Edits 30.03.2023: Added links to all the relevant articles read and used in the paper, Clarified the hypotheses made and made more recommendations for possible opportunities

Hey @awight , I would love to hear your thoughts on my contribution. Thanks!

Hello, @awight and @Simulo. Here is my contribution. I would really love to get feedback from you on it.

“Digital Divisions of Labor and Informational Magnetism: Mapping Participation in Wikipedia” – A summary

Graham, Straumann, and Hogan's 2015 article examines the patterns of participation on Wikipedia and the implications of these patterns for knowledge production. They analyze data from 34 language editions of Wikipedia and over 12 million user contributions to the site.
The authors find that participation on Wikipedia is highly uneven, with a small group of mostly male contributors from countries with high levels of internet connectivity and a strong tradition of academic research responsible for most of the content. They also identify the concept of "informational magnetism" on Wikipedia, where a small number of articles receive a disproportionate amount of views and edits. The authors argue that these patterns of participation may reinforce existing power structures and inequalities, and that increasing participation from underrepresented regions and groups could lead to more diverse forms of knowledge production.

The following are the hypotheses and “informed guesses” I draw from the ‘Digital Divisions of Labor and Informational Magnetism: Mapping Participation in Wikipedia’ article

1. Translation patterns may be influenced by cultural and linguistic factors: The authors suggest that "linguistic and cultural differences are likely to affect participation in digital labor markets" (p. 5) and that "translations between Wikipedias may be influenced by language proximity, historical connections, and cultural similarities. This appears to be the case for regions such as sub-Saharan Africa where most of the countries have more than one indigenous language with their former colonialist’s language being the official language. In such countries there would be more translations from the official language to the various indigenous languages.

2. Certain languages and topics may be more 'magnetic' than others": The authors note that some Wikipedias are more successful at attracting contributions than others, and that certain topics within a language-specific Wikipedia may be more popular than others. They argue that this "informational magnetism" can influence the patterns of translation between different Wikipedias. For example, we might expect to see more translations of popular topics than less popular ones.

3. Certain types of articles may be more likely to be translated than others": The authors note that "Wikipedias tend to differ in terms of the topics that are covered, the number and length of articles, and the quality of information provided" (p. 8) and that some types of articles may be more suited to translation than others. For example, we might expect to see more translations of factual, encyclopedic articles than of opinion-based or culturally specific content.

4. Popular articles are more likely to be translated than less popular articles, likely due to the fact that more people are exposed to them and are thus more likely to find them interesting (Graham et al., 2015, p. 7)

5. Translations will be more likely to occur between languages that have a larger number of speakers. "Languages with larger speaker populations have more active Wikipedias and are more likely to be translated to and from" (Graham et al., 2015, p. 7). This is so because there is a wide variety of articles that can be translated to or from such languages.

6. Participation to Wikipedia also influenced by the amount of articles/content in that particular language “Large amounts of geospatial content show no sign of deterring people from further contributions and editing: as more content exists, so too do more articles to amend, augment, update and build upon… A relative lack of content may further reinforce perceptions amongst editors that little content equates to a small audience that is not worth writing for” Graham et al., 2015, p.19.

7. The patterns of participation in Wikipedia will be influenced by the level of trust and credibility that users place in Wikipedia content. Graham et al. (2015) note that "Wikipedia's credibility is based on the trust that readers place in its content, and this trust is constantly being negotiated and contested". Therefore, the patterns of participation in Wikipedia translations may be influenced by the level of trust and credibility that users place in Wikipedia content, with certain language communities or individuals exerting more influence over content that is perceived as more credible

Conclusion
Overall, these hypotheses and informed guesses suggest that patterns of translation between different Wikipedias are likely to be shaped by a range of factors, including linguistic and cultural differences, the size and activity levels of different language-specific communities, and the popularity of different topics within each language-specific Wikipedia.

By NAMONO JANET RHINA
rhinajn@gmail.com

@Meg.Nyakwaka

Thanks for your summary! Just a detail I am curious about:

"In my opinion to address the geographical representation gap, there are opportunities for Wikipedia to collaborate with other organizations that have a similar mission to promote "

Would organizations like Where there is no doctor (medical knowledge) or mukurtu match your idea? Or do you have something else in mind?

Hey @Simulo , Yes something along those lines. Also do you think I can make a few edits and flesh it out some more? I kept doing some reading after I submitted it and I think I could add to my contribution. Is that possible?

Also do you think I can make a few edits and flesh it out some more?

Yes!

Different communities have different standards on editing posts, but here it makes sense. Its probably good to add a brief line at the bottom like this:

"Edits 2023-03-29: Added reference to Somename2019 and expaned my critique of the metaphor of informational magnetism."

@Simulo @ awight please assist
Theodorah Mbedzi

In their paper "Digital Divisions of Labor and Informational Magnetism: Mapping Participation in Wikipedia", Graham, Straumann, and Hogan investigate the patterns of participation in Wikipedia, focusing on the distribution of contributors and the topics they engage with. They argue that the uneven distribution of information and power within Wikipedia is shaped by the interplay of several factors, including the differential access to information and the varying levels of social and cultural capital possessed by contributors.

The authors use a variety of quantitative methods to analyze the patterns of participation in Wikipedia, including network analysis, geographic mapping, and content analysis. They find that the distribution of contributors across different language editions of Wikipedia is highly uneven, with a small number of languages dominating the platform. They also observe that the topics covered by Wikipedia are shaped by the interests and biases of its contributors, with certain topics being overrepresented and others being underrepresented.

Based on this paper, one might expect to see similar patterns of participation and content distribution in a dataset of translations between different Wikipedias. For example, one might expect to see that translations between dominant language editions (such as English and German) are more frequent and cover a wider range of topics than translations between less dominant language editions. Additionally, one might expect to see that certain topics are overrepresented or underrepresented in translations between different language editions, depending on the interests and biases of the contributors involved.

Hypotheses and informed guesses:

Hypothesis 1: Translations between dominant language editions of Wikipedia (such as English and German) will be more frequent than translations between less dominant language editions, reflecting the uneven distribution of contributors across different language editions.
Informed Guess 1: "The majority of the content on Wikipedia is in a small number of dominant languages, and these languages are often the ones that are translated between the most." (p. 7)
Hypothesis 2: Translations between different language editions will be more likely to cover certain topics over others, reflecting the interests and biases of the contributors involved.
Informed Guess 2: "There are patterns of unevenness in the topics covered by Wikipedia, which are reflective of the interests and biases of its contributors." (p. 5)

Hypothesis 3: Translations between language editions with similar geographic and cultural backgrounds will be more frequent than translations between language editions with different backgrounds.
Informed Guess 3: "The cultural, social and political context of contributors shapes the topics that are covered and the ways in which they are represented" (p. 11), suggesting that contributors from similar backgrounds may have more in common in terms of topics of interest and cultural references.
Hypothesis 4: The level of detail and accuracy in translations may vary depending on the availability and quality of sources in different languages.
Informed Guess 4: "Access to information is an important factor in the production of content, as it shapes the quality and quantity of contributions that are made." (p. 5) This suggests that translations may vary in terms of their quality and accuracy depending on the availability and reliability of sources in different languages.
Overall, this paper provides insights into the ways in which participation and content distribution are shaped within Wikipedia, and can help inform our expectations of patterns in a dataset of translations between different Wikipedias. However, further research would be needed to test these hypotheses and explore other potential factors that may influence translation patterns, such as the level of demand for specific topics in different language editions.

In T331199#8685789, @Isi_Irabor wrote:

Hello, good evening. I have read the paper and my contribution is documented below in the google doc. Please tell me what you think and give feedback, thank you @Simulo @awight

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nGi4hwoACZePUBkadYcSeN0XReupkOJzwt8Ccuu1pUU/edit?usp=sharing

Your essay brings together some key concepts, thank you for your work and for sharing it with us!

Colonisation has played a very significant role in this suppression of knowledge and local voices, largely by replacing most of the local customs witn that of the coloniser, which tends to lead to cultural erasure eventually.

Absolutely, and this is sort of threat I imagine when I see translation ratios of 100:1. Even the project of "preservation" of culture is suspect when looked at from this perspective, in my opinion. I had a professor who would make the point to us that colonisers would quickly set up a museum to preserve the culture of the people they were subjugating and whether or not it was intentional the impact of the museum would be to demonstrate that local culture is dead and static, not simple safeguarded but put under the control of the colonisers.

I would go even further and say that our memory of this tipping point may well factor into the question you raise in this quote,

It remains largely unclear why some people and places are more likely to participate than others

--Perhaps a museum of culture is inherently a Eurocentric project?

most translators are probably male, and have access to more resources than the average person.

This is something we could test by means of a translator survey. I see you have a question about gender, but nothing that gives a direct socioeconomic index--I believe "years of education" usually serves as a polite and easily comparable proxy for this? There is a trade-off when asking these questions of course, but it seems relevant if we find a correlation between education and choice of translation languages!

This means that most translators in smaller localities are probably not locals or native speakers themselves but foreigners typically.

Strange, right?

Do you have ideas about how we might change this dynamic? What might the effect be if translation were more collaborative, involved cross-cultural and cross-linguistic discussion, ...

The studies and research showed that countries with higher internet broadband penetration also have higher rates of contribution

Broadband was strongly correlated with edits, note however that countries with fewer broadband connections had disproportionately high edits as well. But your point certainly stands.

Your Hypothesis 5 nicely summarizes the paper. I still get tripped up when trying to apply these concepts to translation, however. Maybe we can cross this paper with the translation question by looking at the geocoding of articles being translated... What confuses me is, if you imagine the English mother-tongue editor who is passionate about writing articles on Sub-Saharan Africa, linguistically they would be most comfortable translating *into* English. If you imagine an editor who lives in a former British colony such as Nigeria who is also an English mother-tongue speaker, and who is passionate about writing about British history on English Wikipedia, then they seem also predisposed to be translating into English and writing about topics which will not be covered as well in other local languages which they might be multilingual in. Following the framework of the paper we're discussing here, can you paint a scenario of the editor who is translating from English and make guesses about why they do this? Is this a prevalent user profile, according to the numbers in the paper?

In T331199#8685843, @Adeshile-Oluwatosin wrote:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g0BHAHENfIBjHWfz3lN2vEeIs8I-nWlaltbhRRdildM/edit

I could not find your source quotes in the context of the paper we're discussing. Maybe from something else?

In T331199#8686526, @Emile-Daisy wrote:

"a small number of languages, especially English, German, French, and Spanish, account for the vast bulk of contributions to Wikipedia, whereas many other languages have only a handful of active writers,"

I just pulled these numbers and they don't line up with whatever this quote comes from. Here's the data: https://gitlab.com/wmde/technical-wishes/wiki-article-counter/-/blob/main/wiki_article_counts.csv

The counts and explanation may be surprising. Just looking at the top ten,

wiki	article_count
enwiki	6633878
cebwiki	6123643
dewiki	2784546
svwiki	2559828
frwiki	2507405
nlwiki	2119062
ruwiki	1902817
eswiki	1848615
itwiki	1803353
arzwiki	1617120

Double-checking, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics and https://ceb.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espesyal:Estadistika ! What is going on?

In T331199#8686639, @Eberey wrote:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aYEyXoko0vjcsHbAHXmXSwAyhgE-Gbo1/view?usp=drivesdk

Hi, while I generally agree with the facts given, would you like to make some guesses about the translation aspect in particular? Assuming all of these influences affect *who* is editing Wikipedia, let's assume an example person is multilingual in English and another language—what is going to make them choose to translate from X->English vs. English->X?

Short Summary of the Paper titled "Digital Division of labor and informational magnetism: Mapping participation in Wikipedia"
@Simulo @awight feedback will be appreciated

Wikipedia serves as a hub for user-generated content. It is available in many languages, allowing people from all over the world to contribute and share their knowledge. This platform provides a unique opportunity to study the geographies of voice and participation as it is widely used and easily accessible.

According to the article, one of the key advantages of online communities like Wikipedia is their potential to democratize knowledge production. By allowing anyone to contribute information, they challenge traditional hierarchies of expertise and enable a more inclusive approach to knowledge creation.
However, as many scholars have noted, this potential is not always realized in practice.

Through analyzing the content, editing patterns, and contributions made on Wikipedia, researchers can identify geographical patterns in terms of who participates and how they participate. For instance, studies have shown that there is a significant gender gap, with fewer women actively contributing compared to men.
While many people may visit sites like Wikipedia, only a small percentage actually contribute content or engage in discussions. This can create a "power law" distribution of participation, where a small group of highly active contributors dominate the site while the majority of users remain passive.

To address these challenges, researchers have proposed a variety of strategies, such as improving the design of online platforms to encourage broader participation, creating incentives for diverse contributions, and building stronger networks among users.
Overall, understanding the potential and limitations of online communities like Wikipedia is crucial for realizing their democratizing potential and creating more inclusive and equitable systems of knowledge production.

Hypotheses:

High-speed, broadband Internet connections are likely to enhance the experience of editing Wikipedia by positively impacting the speed and ease of accessing and updating content as compared to non-broadband connections.

The data gathered also highlighted the importance of language in contributing to Wikipedia, with English-speaking countries contributing the most content overall. This has implications for the accessibility of information on Wikipedia for non-English speakers, as well as potential biases in the information available

The sections on the gender gap in Wikipedia contributors highlighted the significant underrepresentation of women contributing to the site. This has implications for the types of content and perspectives that are represented on the site, highlighting the need for increased diversity in contributors.

The patterns of participation and engagement are still heavily shaped by structural factors such as wealth, education, gender, race, and geography. For example, some regions of the world (such as North America and Western Europe) are still over-represented in online discussions and debates, while others (such as Africa and Southeast Asia) are marginalised or excluded.

In T331199#8739793, @awight wrote:

In T331199#8685789, @Isi_Irabor wrote:

Hello, good evening. I have read the paper and my contribution is documented below in the google doc. Please tell me what you think and give feedback, thank you @Simulo @awight

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nGi4hwoACZePUBkadYcSeN0XReupkOJzwt8Ccuu1pUU/edit?usp=sharing

Your essay brings together some key concepts, thank you for your work and for sharing it with us!

Colonisation has played a very significant role in this suppression of knowledge and local voices, largely by replacing most of the local customs witn that of the coloniser, which tends to lead to cultural erasure eventually.

Absolutely, and this is sort of threat I imagine when I see translation ratios of 100:1. Even the project of "preservation" of culture is suspect when looked at from this perspective, in my opinion. I had a professor who would make the point to us that colonisers would quickly set up a museum to preserve the culture of the people they were subjugating and whether or not it was intentional the impact of the museum would be to demonstrate that local culture is dead and static, not simple safeguarded but put under the control of the colonisers.

I would go even further and say that our memory of this tipping point may well factor into the question you raise in this quote,

It remains largely unclear why some people and places are more likely to participate than others

--Perhaps a museum of culture is inherently a Eurocentric project?

most translators are probably male, and have access to more resources than the average person.

This is something we could test by means of a translator survey. I see you have a question about gender, but nothing that gives a direct socioeconomic index--I believe "years of education" usually serves as a polite and easily comparable proxy for this? There is a trade-off when asking these questions of course, but it seems relevant if we find a correlation between education and choice of translation languages!

This means that most translators in smaller localities are probably not locals or native speakers themselves but foreigners typically.

Strange, right?

Do you have ideas about how we might change this dynamic? What might the effect be if translation were more collaborative, involved cross-cultural and cross-linguistic discussion, ...

The studies and research showed that countries with higher internet broadband penetration also have higher rates of contribution

Broadband was strongly correlated with edits, note however that countries with fewer broadband connections had disproportionately high edits as well. But your point certainly stands.

Your Hypothesis 5 nicely summarizes the paper. I still get tripped up when trying to apply these concepts to translation, however. Maybe we can cross this paper with the translation question by looking at the geocoding of articles being translated... What confuses me is, if you imagine the English mother-tongue editor who is passionate about writing articles on Sub-Saharan Africa, linguistically they would be most comfortable translating *into* English. If you imagine an editor who lives in a former British colony such as Nigeria who is also an English mother-tongue speaker, and who is passionate about writing about British history on English Wikipedia, then they seem also predisposed to be translating into English and writing about topics which will not be covered as well in other local languages which they might be multilingual in. Following the framework of the paper we're discussing here, can you paint a scenario of the editor who is translating from English and make guesses about why they do this? Is this a prevalent user profile, according to the numbers in the paper?

Good day. Thank you for the very thorough review. I want to try answering a few of the questions you raised.

This is something we could test by means of a translator survey. I see you have a question about gender, but nothing that gives a direct socioeconomic index--I believe "years of education" usually serves as a polite and easily comparable proxy for this? There is a trade-off when asking these questions of course, but it seems relevant if we find a correlation between education and choice of translation languages!

I will definitely edit and correct my survey based on the feedback you just gave about that. I think it would probably also make it easier to differentiate the education levels between the genders quite easily and make it clear if there is a correlation to being a translator.

Strange, right?

Honestly, based on my experience, not really. I am Nigerian and i have noticed that there really isn't a very high focus on pro bono work, especially if it's of no personal benefit. Most Nigerians, would quite understandably prefer to put their effort into something that would profit them, just because they have to think of how to afford their basic needs. A lot of these foreigners might not technically be wealthy but most times, the exchange and conversion rate of their currency onto the local currency makes them infinitely more comfortable and freer with their choices on how to send their time.

Honestly, a lot more people, especially in these "smaller economies" would probably be interested If they had better standards of living, access to better light or internet connection etc but these are things that aren't so easily done. More free or affordable collaborative spaces where people could come together and reasonably expect power and internet connection would probably foster this and also foster more discussion.

Collaborative Translation would ensure that less things are lost or mistranslated which is actually a bit of an issue. Take movies for example. I watch a lot of foreign movies and I have to use subtitles to watch them. One constant thing I have noticed is that, typically there are almost always complaints from native speakers about how a particular sentence structure lost some key meaning when it was translated which sometimes even reduced the impact of the scene. What I am trying to get at is that, Multiple people coming together and translating a project would help to reduce instances of this.

Your Hypothesis 5 nicely summarizes the paper. I still get tripped up when trying to apply these concepts to translation, however. Maybe we can cross this paper with the translation question by looking at the geocoding of articles being translated... What confuses me is, if you imagine the English mother-tongue editor who is passionate about writing articles on Sub-Saharan Africa, linguistically they would be most comfortable translating *into* English. If you imagine an editor who lives in a former British colony such as Nigeria who is also an English mother-tongue speaker, and who is passionate about writing about British history on English Wikipedia, then they seem also predisposed to be translating into English and writing about topics which will not be covered as well in other local languages which they might be multilingual in. Following the framework of the paper we're discussing here, can you paint a scenario of the editor who is translating from English and make guesses about why they do this? Is this a prevalent user profile, according to the numbers in the paper?

A simple scenario would probably be a Nigerian editor, who speaks English (the official language of Nigeria), but also their native language (Nigeria has over a 100 tribes, each with their own unique language or culture) translating an article from English into their native language to make it easier for native speakers less familiar with english to read and understand. A guess of why this could happen is that; even though English is technically Nigeria's official language, a lot of tribes, especially the more isolationist ones, tend to fall back on their native languages instead. Typically only the most educated would be well versed in english and it's easier to share knowledge in a language people understand.

It is a relevant user profile to me, but probably in the minority

Hey @Simulo I made a few edits as mentioned earlier. Also yes, Mukurtu would definitely be one of the organizations we would be interest in. I think it would be a good starting point when doing a needs assessment, based on who are their main contributors and where do they come from, what they are writing about. I think another one of interest would be Localization lab as its contributors work on both Wikipedia and Localization lab. It would be an opportunity to understand the complexities of translation from the users and how these can increase participation in Wikipedia. What are your thoughts on this?

Thank you for your feedback, I am highly honoured.
From the paper discussed, we see that translations are more likely to occur
from larger language usage to smaller language usage. It is also noted that
larger language editions have more editors,more active editors, and
administration than smaller language editions.
Therefore my informed guess would be that as an "editing Wikipedian":

1. The number of users would determine my source Language and Target

Language; The higher the users of a particular language, the higher the
number of translations it will get. If for example, I being a Nigerian, and
an editing Wikipedian being a multi-lingual in English and Yoruba, when
making translations on Wikipedia I will choose to translate from Yoruba to
English because I know it will get to a wider audience than from English to
Yoruba.
Choosing to translate from English to Yoruba means I am only trying to
reach out to a small amount of users.

2. The users will determine what language I would choose to translate to or

from. That is my source Language or Target Language would be determined by
the people/users that I would like to reach out to at that point in time
and the reason to which I want to make the translations.
Thank you.

In T331199#8704542, @Manuellabubakar wrote:

@Simulo @awight I have extensively read the article “Digital Divisions of Labor and Informational Magnetism: Mapping Participation in Wikipedia.” and written my hypothesis with regards to patterns that are expected in a dataset between different Wikipedias following the tasks instruction.

Please see my contribution to this task via this etherpad link: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/E1zULmk0N7nKbishNJUD

Thank you for this thoughtful contribution!

Active internet usage does not equal amount of voice and participation

Good point—we might want to ask translators where they reside or do a numerical analysis of translators similar to what this paper does for editors, to better understand the relationship between place and voice.

I like how you turned around the "saturation" perspective and brought out the more positive point from this paper, with "If good content is available, it encourages more people to translate". To combine this with the mutual content gaps demonstrated by Diversity Observatory, it seems that translators *could* find sufficient exciting content to translate between almost any pair of languages.

[...] people from countries with strong economies, governments and resources may translate information into more languages than users from weaker countries.

My gut feeling is that you're right about this, although I didn't see specific evidence in the paper or elsewhere. But it's consistent with the paper, which shows that editors in the former colonial powers have perhaps the luxury of an orientalist fascination with exotic countries outside of their own.

If you want to read more about the editor gender gap on Wikipedia, this is a good entry point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia . It's possible that some of the causes identified here could also apply to the global editing gap, for example an aversion to the conflict or culture biases exhibited in talk pages.

Here's a group trying to address the gender gap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red

Hello @Simulo @awight, here is my contribution for this task. If it's not too late could you please review it and provide some feedback? Thanks!

Link to Etherpad

Summary

There are now more than 3 billion Internet users worldwide. In theory, the connections it offers allow for unprecedented communication and social participation. The purpose of this article is to explore how these potentials affect actual participation patterns. By focusing on Wikipedia, the world's largest repository of user-generated content, we can gain important insights into the geography of voice and participation.

The article shows that the relative democratization of the Internet has not brought a simultaneous democratization of voice and participation. Although widely used around the world, Wikipedia is characterized by a very uneven geography of participation. Pointing out these inequalities does not mean that they are insurmountable. Our regression analysis shows that the availability of broadband Internet has a clear effect on people's propensity to participate in Wikipedia. However, the relationship is not linear.
As the country approaches a level of connectivity above about 450,000 broadband Internet connections, the ability of broadband Internet access to positively influence participation continues to increase. Making this difficult is the fact that participation from the world's economic periphery often focuses on editing for the global core, rather than its own local regions. These findings ultimately point to the information magnetism generated by the world's economic centers, creating vicious and benevolent circles that impede the reorganization of networks and knowledge production hierarchies.

Based on this article, the following patterns can be expected in the dataset of translations between different Wikipedias:

1.Unequal representation of languages: Wikipedias in dominant languages such as English, German, Spanish, French or Chinese may have significantly more articles and translations than those in less commonly used languages, especially those spoken in the economic periphery.

2.Focus on topics related to economic centers: Articles and translations may see a greater focus on topics related to the economic centers of the world, such as the United States, Europe and China, at the expense of those more local and regional.

3.Variation in translation quality: The quality of translations between different Wikipedias can vary, especially for less commonly used languages, where the number of editors and access to information sources may be limited.

4.Asymmetry in information flow: Due to the uneven geography of participation and the impact of information magnetism, the flow of information between Wikipedias can be expected to be asymmetrical. Translations from dominant languages to less common languages may be more frequent than the other way around.

5.Focus on translations of articles with general coverage: Translations between different Wikipedias may focus mainly on articles with broad coverage, such as science, technology, history or culture, at the expense of more local topics and content that may be of less interest to the international community.

Here are my hypotheses and "informed guesses"

1.Hypothesis: The availability of broadband Internet influences participation in Wikipedia.Informed conjecture: The greater the number of broadband Internet connections in a country, the greater the propensity of people to participate in Wikipedia.Excerpt from the article: "Our regression analysis shows that the availability of broadband Internet has a clear effect on people's propensity to participate in Wikipedia."

2.Hypothesis: The geography of Wikipedia participation is uneven.
Informed conjecture: Wikipedias in dominant languages have more articles and participants than those in less commonly used languages.
Article excerpt: "Although widely used around the world, Wikipedia is characterized by a very uneven geography of participation."

3.Hypothesis: Participation from the world's economic periphery focuses on editing about the global core.
Educated guess: People from countries with lower levels of economic development may be more interested in editing articles about richer countries than those about their own regions.
An excerpt from the article: "Making this issue more difficult is the fact that participation from the world's economic periphery often focuses on editing about the world's core rather than their own local regions."

4.Hypothesis: There is information magnetism generated by global economic centers.
An educated guess: Influential economic centers attract more attention and information resources, leading to a stronger position in the global knowledge network.
Excerpt from the article: "These results ultimately point to the information magnetism generated by global economic centers, creating vicious and benevolent circles that impede the reorganization of networks and knowledge production hierarchies."

5.Hypothesis: The relationship between broadband access and Wikipedia participation is not linear.
An educated guess: For countries with very high levels of connectivity, additional increases in broadband access may not affect Wikipedia participation as much as for countries with lower levels of connectivity.

Excerpt from the article: "As the country approaches connectivity levels above about 450,000 broadband Internet connections, the ability of broadband Internet access to positively impact participation continues to grow."

@Simulo @awight

Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

In T331199#8704906, @Kaycee13 wrote:

potential to democratize knowledge production

"The article unfortunately demonstrates that the democratizing potential of Wikipedia has not been realized."

We hope to help realize this potential! Do you want to connect some of the points in your summary to what we've found about translation?

Hi @Simulo and @awight

I submitted my contribution a while back but I did not get feedback. This is a link to my contribution below.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cqCCh4fBnenJ5P8gnD87k46hw3M0sfEjHcIGcOFPbIg/edit?usp=sharing

Your feedback and corrections would be appreciated @Simulo and @awight

In T331199#8707241, @Kachiiee wrote:

https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Summary%2F_Hypothesis

Your hypotheses are pointing towards the value of repeating the Informational Magnetism study specifically on published translations, and I tend to agree that this could be productive. I'm not sure whether there's enough data however, the number of translations is much lower than normal edits.

However, there might be something that can be done by opening up the suggester algorithm, which I believe includes some weighting factors for how many pageviews an article receives. Can you think of ways to test your hypotheses?

In T331199#8707300, @Omotayo1990 wrote:

Hi, thank you for the thoughtful summary!

There is some tension between "geographic setting", the idea that people will edit about what is familiar, vs. "informational magnetism". I think you're right to bring up both points in your hypotheses, they both seem in evidence in the study we're responding to. Do you agree that there might be some opportunity to develop this tension into a tool for balancing translations? For example, adjusting the suggestion algorithm to more heavily weight local cultural content identified by Diversity Observatory so that translators can find geographically familiar topics which are underrepresented in other language wikis...

@awight A review will be appreciated too

https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Summary%2F_Hypothesis

@Kachiiee Thanks! I read your contribution. The hypothesis make sense to me.

In T331199#8707560, @TegaUdi wrote:

Hello mentors @awight ,@Simulo, @srishakatux , kindly find my contribution in this open-source link https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/TegaUdi.

This details my little opinion in the resolution of the given task. Your feedbacks are anticipated and highly appreciated.

Thank you! Can you imagine a potential intervention which tests or reverses one of the effects you describe in your hypotheses?

I didn't quite get your point about anonymous editors. The study says a few things about anonymous editors, that the sample includes roughly twice as many registered edits as anonymous edits, and that anonymous edits are more often about local topics. The percentage of geocoded edits is much higher for anonymous edits just because the user's IP address becomes visible due to a flaw (by design) in MediaWiki.

In T331199#8715561, @KoketsoC wrote:

On the other hand, most low/middle income households in countries that have low levels of economic development, cannot afford to purchase a computer/laptop, do not have access to the internet or cannot afford data/Wi-Fi and these financial hurdles prevent these individuals from taking part in generating fitting content.

Agreed. There might also be further economic hurdles such as the luxury of spare time for volunteer work, in some regions there's competition in the space (eg. Baidu in China), and until the wikis have a critical mass of relevant local cultural content it might be hard to justify editing Wikipedia vs. other activities.

2. Variety of translation might result in redundance, and this will take away the element of creativity and originality from the author.

I can confirm this from my personal experience. Translation work can often feel simultaneously helpful to the world, and constraining to the individual. We've been asking the question in other comments above and in T331200, whether translators feel that they have to translate exactly or if there's space for paraphrasing, and for factual correction. Perhaps this is something we would learn more about through a survey or interviews.

This article shows that the relative democratization of the Internet has not brought about a concurrent democratization of voice and participation.

Yeah this is a pity. Hopefully our research project can have some impact on dynamics of whose voices and topics are amplified.

[...] while one Wikipedia states a version of events, another Wikipedia might give a slightly different one which to some extent will distort the truth because of how the research was conducted.

Really interesting. So there might not only be cultural and linguistic barriers between wikis, but also factual disagreements for example the Turkish and Greek articles on Cyprus...

In T331199#8716225, @Zepha_W wrote:

[...] more translation taking place between language that are spoken in regions that have lots of broadband internet access.

This would be an interesting pattern to find. I'm not sure whether this is a detail that can be seen from the paper we looked at, although it seems like a perfectly reasonable guess about what would happen. But I wonder, why between similarly "wired" languages and not across the periphery / core boundary discussed in the paper?

With more pages on issues that are pertinent to the economic cores getting translated than articles about themes that are particular to peripheral regions, Wikipedia's translation trends across different language versions are anticipated to take into account the global economic hierarchy.

This sounds well-supported by the paper.

These patterns may also help to maintain dominant narratives in the creation of knowledge and perpetuate current power dynamics.

Good summary of what makes the imbalances scary!

In T331199#8717437, @986_875_764 wrote:

I'm not sure where the quotes came from--maybe a different paper? I also don't see the same tendency to edit "similar" wikis, maybe find some more support for that concept?

In T331199#8747792, @awight wrote:

In T331199#8707560, @TegaUdi wrote:

Hello mentors @awight ,@Simulo, @srishakatux , kindly find my contribution in this open-source link https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/TegaUdi.

This details my little opinion in the resolution of the given task. Your feedbacks are anticipated and highly appreciated.

Thank you! Can you imagine a potential intervention which tests or reverses one of the effects you describe in your hypotheses?

I didn't quite get your point about anonymous editors. The study says a few things about anonymous editors, that the sample includes roughly twice as many registered edits as anonymous edits, and that anonymous edits are more often about local topics. The percentage of geocoded edits is much higher for anonymous edits just because the user's IP address becomes visible due to a flaw (by design) in MediaWiki.

Hi @awight, thank you for reading my contribution and your feedback. It is highly appreciated.

One potential intervention that can make a huge difference and test one of the hypothesis is affordable broadband data being available to the countries in the periphery, for example like my country, Nigeria. I believe that the higher the availability of data access and required computer tools, the higher the languages of Nigeria, such as Yoruba, would be used by translators to contribute contents that would be consumed by the locals and the rest of the world. This giving the periphery an edge to content contribution in Wikipedia.

As for my point on the anonymous editors, I was trying to point the fact that a huge number of translators of local and lower democratize languages could make up for a higher percent of these anonymous edits. This therefore might not give us a full data view of translators themselves and thier effective contributed languages.

@Simulo thanks so much for the feedback. @awight and @Simulo how do we I get a review on my timeline

In T331199#8747958, @Kachiiee wrote:

@Simulo thanks so much for the feedback. @awight and @Simulo how do we I get a review on my timeline

Hi, would you please send a link to the timeline? Sorry if you've already done so and I can't find it. Also feel free to ping me on https://wikimedia.zulipchat.com .

In T331199#8747599, @LeilaKaltouma wrote:

Link to Etherpad

They find that only a small group of editors is responsible for the majority of edits and that these editors are more likely to focus on articles that are already popular and have a high level of activity.

This is an important question but I think the paper is going in a slightly different direction. The theme of a small group of editors doing most of the edits can be traced through the literature by searching for "Who writes Wikipedia?", a reference to an old conversation. Surprisingly, there are "elite" editors who make many edits but the correlation between edits and words added to an article is actually very low, see for example https://opensym.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/os20-paper-a3-chhabra.pdf . The "Digital Divisions of Labor" paper is more interested in the large differences between readers and writers (as opposed to writers and very active writers).

I'm also unsure about the popularity of articles driving editing. This is studied elsewhere and there's some evidence to support it, but the effect found by this paper is even stranger: the editing patterns aren't simply related to participation levels in each region, but when editing does happen the flows of editing non-local topics are different for each region.

Lack of local content is definitely a deterrent, and if the existing content is being disproportionally written by editors in regions who are unfamiliar with the topics we might have the wrong picture of there being a slow improvement in number of articles, if the quality is low.

To read more about the gender representation issues on Wikipedia, here are some entry points: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red

In T331199#8735060, @NJRhina wrote:

I can't find these quotes in the paper, so it's hard to respond.

In T331199#8747728, @awight wrote:

In T331199#8707300, @Omotayo1990 wrote:

Hi, thank you for the thoughtful summary!

There is some tension between "geographic setting", the idea that people will edit about what is familiar, vs. "informational magnetism". I think you're right to bring up both points in your hypotheses, they both seem in evidence in the study we're responding to. Do you agree that there might be some opportunity to develop this tension into a tool for balancing translations? For example, adjusting the suggestion algorithm to more heavily weight local cultural content identified by Diversity Observatory so that translators can find geographically familiar topics which are underrepresented in other language wikis...

Thank you for your feedback @awight
This tension between geographic setting and informational magnetism could potentially be used as a tool for balancing translations. We can prioritize translation by identifying articles that have a strong pull from editors in various geographic locations. This would guarantee that the translations are not biased towards a single cultural viewpoint, but rather reflect a more balanced and wide spectrum of viewpoints.
Essentially, the notion of digital divisions of labor and informational magnetism has significant implications for how we think about online communities like Wikipedia. We can better create tools and tactics for encouraging diversity and inclusion in these communities if we understand the factors that drive participation.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lQGTJeYYKGFWu627QZ-5XRuCnJxMy355/view?usp=share_link

@awight @Simulo

do give feedback

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bUWeOHphalXXycgwArxkGAQ9rlFQhJYq/view?usp=share_link

@awight @Simulo here is another attempt
hoping for a feedback

In T331199#8748722, @Theodorahmbedzi8 wrote:

Sure, I can respond to this summary.

I'm having trouble moving beyond quoted text such as:

"Wikipedia's open editing policy means that topics with more interested participants will have more entries and edits" (p. 7)

This quote doesn't appear in the paper we're discussing and doesn't clearly relate to its main points. If you're bringing in material from other papers that's great but please give the full citation. It's more difficult than you might imagine to respond meaningfully to many different versions of long essays which are anchored in mysteriously unfindable quotes.

If you're serious about contributing, I'd much rather engage with just a short paragraph that presents your own thoughts on the issue—which is the point of this task after all.

@awight i tried lookiing at it again https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dtXPXZ1oM6JCmXQfNswdiQEDg6f7iHCZ/view?usp=share_link please check if its okay thank you

In T331199#8748818, @Theodorahmbedzi8 wrote:

@awight i tried lookiing at it again https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dtXPXZ1oM6JCmXQfNswdiQEDg6f7iHCZ/view?usp=share_link please check if its okay thank you

Thank you for taking the time to do this! That's a powerful statement—all media platforms are subject to the context that they operate in, and although Wikipedia's means of production has a truly democratizing potential, it has only been partially realized. I completely agree with the idea that we'll need to actively push and organize in order to improve equitable participation, it won't just happen on its own.

Translation is a small component of this, and it's possible that the uneven flows we're seeing are also a reflection of "informational magnetism", maybe we can find out whether this is the case or if the imbalance is caused by other factors. Even if it is informational magnetism, maybe there are ways to gently counteract it without going against the autonomy of translators to make their own choices about what to translate.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/168jZ0zIXM2yPR4EOYch8RXSNeA4vcYl5/edit?usp=drivesdk&ouid=107779623506351624754&rtpof=true&sd=true @awight something like that??

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kFYasBw29CblWhTDR9VY9tMuuow4Hqil-i6W1snQ2tQ/edit

Hello, @awight and @Simulo. Here is my contribution.
Sorry for inconviences!
I know I am too late here, due to my University exams. I would really love to get feedback and suggestions from you on it(if possible).

Summary:
"Digital Divisions of Labor and Informational Magnetism: Mapping Participation in Wikipedia" is a research paper published in the journal "Annals of the Association of American Geographers" in 2015 by Mark Grahm, Ralph K Straumann, and Bernie Hogan.
In this modern tech world Internet is the most suitable and preferable way of communication and participation, and according to data about 3 billion internet users are present on the planet allows for an unprecedented amount of communication and public participation. The main purpose of this paper is to examine how these numeric patterns match up to actual patterns of participation, by focusing on patterns of participation as active engagement through the generation and contribution of content in different language versions of Wikipedia rather than use. This paper examines the reasons and factors that are majorly responsible for uneven geographies of voice and participation on Wikimedia and shows the correlation between them and how they affect participation by using regression analysis of data collected from Wikipedia. This paper explores the availability of Broadband Internet connectivity as the best predictor of participation in Wikipedia and shows how adaptive challenges such as Motivation to contribute, Language biases, community size, Biases in topic selection, cultural differences, and willingness to edit about the world’s cores rather than their local regions also play an important role in the uneven participation and contribution. This paper also expresses that the potential of contemporary media and digital practices to circumvent conventional narratives are more important than ever to fulfill this unevenness. This paper ultimately points to an informational magnetism that is cast by the world’s economic cores; virtuous and vicious cycles that make it difficult to reconfigure networks and hierarchies of
knowledge production.

Based on the research paper "Digital Division of Labor and Informational Magnetism: Mapping Participation in Wikipedia", here are some hypotheses and informed guesses about the patterns that may emerge in a dataset of translation and participation between different Wikipedias.

1. Snippet from the paper:

“Wikipedia is only edited by a tiny proportion of its users the editors themselves are overwhelmingly educated and male and the information on
the platform is far more likely to represent topics in the Global North than the Global South.”
Hypothesis:
This snippet explores the unevenness(only 2.5 % of editors are responsible for 75% of all editions) and domination of male editors and
contributors on Wikipedia as Women make up less than 13% of total contributions on Wikipedia. This also shows that the available contents are
more related to Global North than Global South which represents a clear picture of geographical unevenness and domination of North
peripheries.

2. Snippet from the paper:

“We find that many articles about places are edited by non-locals, thus challenging the idea that Wikipedia offers a platform for a local voice.
Second, much of the small amount of participation that we see originates in low-income countries and is actually focused on writing about
global cores.”
Hypothesis:
This snippet shows how Wikipedia is dominant by some special communities of the world and how the lack of Motivation to contribute to local
content leads the less participation and backwardness of geographies of voice and participation of low-income countries.

3. Snippet from the paper:

We rely on a set of national-level indicators that we postulate are predictors of participation in Wikipedia (these statistics include data on area,
population, GDP, Gross Enrolment Ratio, and broadband Internet connections from the World Bank).
Hypothesis:
This snippet examines the national sets that are major indicators of participation on Wikimedia. The data available on area/country and the
population are baseline variable that is related to the available content for contribution and the pool of people that could participate in editing
Wikipedia. GDP and GRE are one of the dominant factors that provide the necessary ingredients for Wikipedia editorship

4. Snippet from the paper:

Countries with high broadband penetration tend to have exponentially louder voices on Wikipedia than countries with low penetration rates.
Hypothesis:
Editing Wikipedia requires an Internet connection and hence countries with good broadband internet access have more contributing and active
participators on Wikipedia and they make an effective and dominant effect on counties with low access rates rather than wealth, education, or
the number of people. This is the most effective factor that causes the difference in the geographies of voice and participation because
broadband is a clear determinant of the propensity of people to participate on Wikipedia.

5. Snippet from the paper: Countries that are home to large blocks of editors have the ability to dominate the production of knowledge about smaller countries.

Hypothesis:
The counties that have a large and active community of editors are more dominant on the world peripheries because their active editors make
an impactful and knowledgeable contribution about their country, their local areas, structure, and resources and provide a voice to local communities of that country.

6. Snippet from the paper:

The website(Wikipedia) contains over thirty million articles written in close to three-hundred languages. The English language Wikipedia has
approximately 4,350,000 articles as of February 2013, meaning that one in every sixth article refers to a geographic location.
Hypothesis: This explores that the English language is the most dominant language on Wikipedia as most of the editing activities occur for English Wikipedia and some of the policies are only limited to the English language. This shows an effective unevenness in the contribution and translation of content on Wikipedia. In the world, English Wikipedia has the largest knowledge resources and contributing community than other languages.

Overall these hypotheses and patterns in a dataset of translations between different Wikipedias suggest that participation and editing practices in Wikipedia are influenced by a range of factors, including interactions between language communities, availability of required resources, motivations for participation, informational magnetism, and community size. This paper mapped, measured, and modeled novel data about online participation in one of the world’s largest, most visible, and most used platforms and suggested the reasons and solutions for unevenness on Wikipedia.
I think the study of participation and editing practices, Translation imbalances, and geographies of voice and participation in Wikipedia across different language communities and world peripheries is an important area of research that can provide insights into the production and dissemination of knowledge in the digital age.

Hi,

I submitted my contribution a while back but I did not get feedback. This is my summary:

The majority of translations are between closely related languages. The authors note that "most translations occur between Wikipedias of languages that are closely related to each other" (p. 521).

Certain language pairs have higher translation rates than others. For example, the authors find that "the English Wikipedia serves as a hub for translations to and from other languages" (p. 527), suggesting that English may have a higher translation rate with other languages than those languages have with each other.

The quality of translations varies across language pairs. The authors note that "translations between languages that share a script tend to be of higher quality than translations between languages that use different scripts" (p. 525), suggesting that factors such as script similarity may affect the quality of translations.
The volume of translations may vary across topics. The authors find that "some topics, such as mathematics and philosophy, are more likely to be translated than others" (p. 527), suggesting that certain topics may be of greater interest or relevance to translators.

Overall, my hypotheses and guesses suggest that patterns in translation behavior between different Wikipedias may be influenced by a range of factors, including language relatedness, translation hubs, script similarity, and topic relevance.

Hello, @awight. I wanted to address some questions you asked that I missed during the contribution period but consider interesting. Overall, thanks for the feedback.

In T331199#8722645, @awight wrote:

• That Wikipedia, in spite of its internal ecosystem, is vulnerable to the availability and “network power”

If you have more thoughts to share about this internal ecosystem, I'm curious. I have a hard time identifying any specific mechanisms which might counteract the dominating effects, if anything I suspect that the only layer of protection might literally be the language barrier.

Context:
In 2021, I read, studied, and briefly analyzed user engagement and behavior on Wikipedia based on clickstream for several articles, with the Wikipedia Clickstream Dumps (https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/clickstream/readme.html). My findings, which were also guided by some papers I read on the topic, such as https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3289600.3291021, helped me conclude that:

• “Biography” and “media” were the most popular reported topics across languages.
• Most traffic to Wikipedia comes via search engines, at least for the Spanish January 2021 clickstream dump, which was the one I studied the most.
• The previous items are highly related. For example, Joe Biden was highly researched just days prior to and after his presidential election. Not only in English but also in Spanish. This would suggest that during that time, he was highly searched externally and people were directed to Wikipedia thanks to that influence.

Although not perfect, my work was documented here: https://public-paws.wmcloud.org/66093174/task-01.ipynb

Thanks to that brief analysis and my experience with related papers, we can tell that people read Wikipedia thanks to external drivers, which is natural.

What I propose:

I feel this is not necessarily negative when used as a hook. In other words, internally, the system can try to maintain the user engaged or help them become long-term contributors and translators.

These are some suggestions:

• Enable more transparency of the problem or imbalance on a deeper level and, if possible, make the information more accessible or easier to reach within Wikipedia for translators and editors.
• To slowly enable a recommendation system based on user interest and lack of content/translation in that “area/topic” for a specific language pair.
• A rewards program. There could be triggers that make the user more engaged. For example, after editing my page on Wikipedia a few days ago, I received a notification to encourage me to edit more. When an article is outdated, Wikipedia also encourages editing it. These techniques could be enforced.

I was inspired by: https://uxdesign.cc/5-more-methods-to-influence-user-behavior-cf4a644a47c8

Overall, from anecdotal evidence, it is important to understand editors' and translators' motivations behind the basic requirements to be able to enable changes that Wikipedia can cover. The foundation cannot have a huge and immediate impact on whether certain groups have access to connection or not, but once those basic requirements are met, other dimensions can be explored to balance the differences. For example, I am someone who now meets the basic requirements I defined to become a frequent editor and a potential translator. However, I was not aware of this lack of content and perspective from certain countries and I also would not intuitively know where to start and which topics are the most essential for my community. In other words, I did not know I could make relevant contributions when in my eyes “everything is already available.”

Steps:

• Consider papers on the motivations behind frequent translators. If possible, extend this step by interviewing with more specific questions, those inside and outside the ecosystem and their reasons not to contribute, and vice versa.
• Execute technical changes or enhancements based on that.

• Regions with access to the minimum required criteria to make contributions and translations are more likely to do so and they tend to be from countries of the larger languages.

What would we need to test this hypothesis? Perhaps an estimated geolocation of translators similar to what done in the paper?

Context
First, we would need to define what we consider “minimum requirements.” For the purpose of simplifying this question, we can start with the following (assumed) requirements:

• The ability to read and write (type).
• Access to a functional device that allows the potential translator to complete the objective (to translate).
• Access the required broadband connection (let’s assume, at least 1 MB/s per download and upload).
• Access to electricity to power the device.
• The ability to speak (at least) two languages.
• Available target articles to translate in at least one of the two languages, but because of the focus of this research, we can strictly expect, available target articles in smaller “languages.”

Some observations related to geolocation and the ability to meet these requirements:

Power shortage - Access to electricity to power the device:
Arabic is a widely spoken language around the world, yet, according to the Content Translation statistics, articles translated from Arabic are just 4,516, and from Hindi 1995 as of the numbers to this date. Much less than what you would expect. Here are some stats for countries experiencing power shortages.

• Afghanistan - population 40.1 million
• Pakistan - 231.4 million
• Yemen - 32.98 million
• India - over 1.4 billion

References:

• https://www.generac.com/be-prepared/power-outages/power-outage-financial-losses
• https://elum-energy.com/en/2022/11/04/major-countries-with-load-shedding/

The ability to speak at least two languages fluently:
There is an interesting case, South Korea, which figures as a developed country and meets many basic requirements. You would expect it to figure better with English translations from the languages. Nevertheless, this is not the case. And a way to explain this would be that South Korea has a low number of proficient (fluent) speakers of well-known languages like English: https://www.ef.com/wwen/epi/regions/asia/south-korea/

Interesting case with Spanish as a large language:
Spanish is considered a “large language” on Wikipedia. Yet, when looking at this specific source, we can observe that the majority of edits by project come from Spain, accounting for 39.2% of all edits. Followed by Argentina, Chile, the Netherlands, and Mexico. The Netherlands, an outlier, accounts for 08.1% of all edits. Interestingly enough, the Netherlands has a much smaller (Spanish-speaking) population than many countries where Spanish is the primary language, take for example, Venezuela. The same would happen if we compare Spain with Colombia, with a smaller contrast, of course, but the difference between edits is considerable. We clearly see with different studies that the population of speakers is not a good predictor, but if we were to observe the differences just for Spanish the GDP by country would be a strong predictor.

This strange case of outliers that would not be expected to be “big sources”, such as the Netherlands has been documented before.

References:

• https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Average-number-of-edits-to-Wikipedia-by-country-of-origin_fig1_281059919
• https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/15/wikipedia-view-of-the-world-is-still-written-by-the-west

What I propose:
Steps:

• The basic requirements are defined.
• The estimated geolocation of translators is used.
• The number of translations by country and how this factor relates to the needed requirements are analyzed to determine the outcome.

Hi! Please consider resolving this task and moving any pending items to a new task, as GSoC/Outreachy rounds are now over, and this workboard will soon be archived.