Our analysis shows that the decision to write or not to write an article on a certain topic is not a random one. Similar to the idea of national cultural repertoires in the traditional Cultural Sociology, we find that various linguistic communities apply different grammars of worth and criteria of evaluation when selecting the topics to cover, that would appeal to the common interest of the language community. Thus, each language edition represents a community of shared understanding with unique linguistic point of view, its own controversial topics, and concept coverage.

 

Wikipedia has a power to mobilise cultural communities around a very important collective task -- sifting and archiving important knowledge for the future generations. Our analysis sheds light on how cultural similarities are reflected in this process. We demonstrate that global cultural interconnections are not dominated by one powerful player, but instead follow the locally established 'fault lines' of bilingualism, linguistic relatedness of languages, shared religion, and population attraction.

 

Why is English not dominating the network?
Before we answer this question, a disclamer: We do not study information exchange between Wikipedia language editions. Instead we focus on editing activity within various editions. It is important to understand that writing for a language edition is not a translation task, but rather an independent process for every language. The editors are not necessarily aware of what is written on the topic in other languages, or sometimes even of the fact that the topic is covered by other languages. Moreover, the majority of them only edit their local edition.

 

The question of whether English is becoming the world's lingua franca is an intriguing one. English is an uspoken symbol of globalisation, progress, and innovation. It is the language of news, popular series, advertisement. Speaking English will put you in touch with more people and ideas than speaking any other language. English holds the central place in the network of book translations, multilingual Twitter users, and Wikipedia editors, being on the intersection of all important information exchange highways. This means that ideas or pieces of information travel mostly from 'smaller' languages to English, and radiate to other, 'peripheral' languages from there.

 

So why is English not dominating our network, then? It turns out that the global centrality of a language plays a minor role when it comes to shared information interests. In the network of Wikipedia co-editing similarity, every language is connected with almost every other language, but some of these links have stronger weights than others. This means that every pair of languages shares a number of topics to which both languages show significant interest. Still, certain language dyads have much many in common. Why? What are those dyads?

 

We show that the explanation roots in the strength of 'local' interconnections, and can be explained to a large extent by the number of bilinguals and by linguistic similarity of the languages themselves. It is hard to separate these two effects from one another, since both might be related: shared vocabulary and grammatical features of the languages from the same language family might explain higher levels of bilingualism for these language dyads. Moreover, language choice and bilingualism are an effect of factors galore, such as post-colonial history, education, language and human right policies, free travel, and migration due to political instability, poverty, religious persecutions or work.

 

As English is on its way to become the world's first global lingua franca, in the words of a famous linguist David Chrystal, 'nobody owns it any more.' Or rather, everyone has a small share in it. This is exactly what our results show, with English having shared topics of interest with every other language. However as we focus on the strength of the links,  we show that the domination of English disappears, and instead local interconnections come to the forefront.

 

Some important policy questions for the Wikimedia Foundation

Wikipedia is probably the one most linguistically diverse platforma online, with almost 300 language editions. As speakers of a language acquire digital skills, the language acquires online presence. Wikipedia can be used as an early indicator of a new language crossing the digital divide. It offers a supportive environment for a communiy of language speakers to establish their language and culture in a digital realm, and gain digital prestige.

 

Wikipedia is not a mere encyclopedia where facts are documented, but rather a space where the entire collective memories of important events are constructed during a discursive, social process. Access to, and ability to contribute to construction of this cultural memory place depend on the language skills.

 

Our study shows that the selection of concepts that comprise every language Wikipedia edition is not a random choice, however small the underlying community of editors. Instead, it roots in socio-cultural and linguistic characteristics of the underlying language community. The need to have a working Wikipedia can relate to the need of a language community to establish itself online, communicate their linguistic point of view, negotiate memorable events, construct a cultural memory place, and summarise culturally-relevant knowledge that belongs to the community.

Our findings bring some important policy questions for the Wikimedia Foundation, such as: What are the cultural implications of populating editions with automatically translated concepts present in other language editions? Should English Wikipedia aim at becoming an all-inclusive collection of information from other language editions? Should the decision on who and what will be remembered belong to the community of editors, however small, or to an automated algorithm?

 

We hope that our research will inspire dialogue on how similarities between language communities can be used to improve participation of editors speaking peripheral languages and expand the content of smaller editions.