Cross‐cultural analysis of the Wikipedia community

Noriko Hara, Pnina Shachaf and Khe Foon Hew

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2010, vol. 61, issue 10, 2097-2108

Abstract: This article reports a cross‐cultural analysis of four Wikipedias in different languages and demonstrates their roles as communities of practice (CoPs). Prior research on CoPs and on the Wikipedia community often lacks cross‐cultural analysis. Despite the fact that over 75% of Wikipedia is written in languages other than English, research on Wikipedia primarily focuses on the English Wikipedia and tends to overlook Wikipedias in other languages. This article first argues that Wikipedia communities can be analyzed and understood as CoPs. Second, norms of behaviors are examined in four Wikipedia languages (English, Hebrew, Japanese, and Malay), and the similarities and differences across these four languages are reported. Specifically, typical behaviors on three types of discussion spaces (talk, user talk, and Wikipedia talk) are identified and examined across languages. Hofstede's dimensions of cultural diversity as well as the size of the community and the function of each discussion area provide lenses for understanding the similarities and differences. As such, this article expands the research on online CoPs through an examination of cultural variations across multiple CoPs and increases our understanding of Wikipedia communities in various languages.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21373

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamist:v:61:y:2010:i:10:p:2097-2108

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://doi.org/10.1002/(ISSN)1532-2890

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().