Historically, exchange of goods, money, and information was naturally limited to nearby locations, since globalisation was effectively blocked by spacial, territorial, and cultural barriers. Today, new technology is overcoming these barriers, allowing information to travel more easily and rapidly than physical goods. Still, it remains unclear what are the effective barriers to global information exchange. Since information exchange requires shared interests, we focus on mapping bilateral shared information interests of countries, and discovering the factors that cause such connections.

 

Our analysis is based on Wikipedia editing data, which comes from multiple language editions whose editors are based all over the world. We use the fact that one concept (topic) could be editied in several language editions, and collect all editing data for every concept. Then we look at how often editors from each country edit the same concept. In other words, we use co-editing of the same concept as a proxy for shared information interests.

 

Research Questions

How to quantitatively construct a world map and a network of shared information interests based on large-scale multilingual Wikipedia editing data? What factors best explain the strength of bilateral ties and formation of clusters?

 

Results

In this project, we have collected the editing data about 6,285,753 Wikipedia articles (data comes from Wikipedia dumps) with their entire editing history in all languages. We introduced a method to quantitatively extract interest profiles for countries and built a network and a map of bilateral information interests. Analysing this netowrk, we find out that:

• information profiles are diverse despite globalisation, and the barriers and highways of information exchange are formed by social and economic factors;

• language, religion, geographical proximity, historic background, and trade (in descending order) explain the similarity of interests between nations.

We are interested to extend this methodology to track how this changes over time.