Information asymmetry in Wikipedia across different languages: A statistical analysis

Dwaipayan Roy, Sumit Bhatia and Prateek Jain

Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 2022, vol. 73, issue 3, 347-361

Abstract: Wikipedia is the largest web‐based open encyclopedia covering more than 300 languages. Different language editions of Wikipedia differ significantly in terms of their information coverage. In this article, we compare the information coverage in English Wikipedia (most exhaustive) and Wikipedias in 8 other widely spoken languages, namely Arabic, German, Hindi, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. We analyze variations in different language editions of Wikipedia in terms of the number of topics covered as well as the amount of information discussed about different topics. Further, as a step towards bridging the information gap, we present WikiCompare—a browser plugin that allows Wikipedia readers to have a comprehensive overview of topics by incorporating missing information from Wikipedia page in other language.

Date: 2022
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