Wikimedia Meta-Wiki

Grants:Project/Wikipedia Cultural Diversity Observatory (WCDO)

< Grants:Project


statusselected
Wikipedia Cultural Diversity Observatory (WCDO)
summaryThe Wikipedia Cultural Diversity Observatory (WCDO) is a site to raise awareness on Wikipedia’s current state of cultural diversity, providing datasets, visualizations and statistics, and pointing out solutions to improve intercultural coverage.
targetWikipedia
amount16,800€
grantee• marcmiquel
advisor• sdivad• Diego_(WMF)
contact• marcmiquel(_AT_) gmail.com
researcher• Marcmiquel
this project needs...
volunteer
join
endorse
created on08:29, 24 September 2017 (UTC)


This grant is about the First Phase of what is being put at Wikipedia Cultural Diversity Observatory

Project idea

edit

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

edit

Even though Wikipedia is successful in many senses, one of its main problematics is that the project suffers a systemic bias and does not represent the world knowledge encompassing all the existing diversity - i.e. it tends to favors mainly content and points of view from the Western world to the detriment of the rest of the world.

 
Figure 1. By Cultural Context Content articles (CCC) I refer to the articles on a different range of topics, all related to the editors’ context, occurring in each Wikipedia language edition

This bias seen as a lack of content and representation of certain languages can be explained by the low use of Internet in underdeveloped economies, whose inhabitants do not have time to contribute, among other factors. Instead, the bias seen as a trend can be explained by the process by which each Wikipedia is contextualized by its editors. Each Wikipedia gives more prominence to the editors' geographical territories (Hecht 2013), political context (Massa & Scrinzi 2011, Pentzold et al, 2017), celebrities, language, etcetera.

Likewise, another effect attributed to this contextualization is the inequality between language editions (Van Dijk 2009), both in absolute number of articles (e.g. the English Wikipedia contains 5.4 million, the Catalan Wikipedia 540 thousand and the Chinese Wikipedia 950 thousand), and in the articles they share. Even though English can be considered the "lingua franca" of Wikipedia, it does not cover the half of the articles of the rest of language editions (Hecht, 2013). This phenomenon has been labelled as language gap, and it shows that although the collaborative aspect of the project is the essence, there exist important difficulties in order to create knowledge between languages.

 
Figure 2. Topical coverage distribution in CCC for 15 languages.

In this sense, in my previous work in the framework of a doctoral thesis (Miquel-Ribé 2017) and a publication (Miquel-Ribé & Laniado, 2016) I have presented a study where I first selected the content related to the cultural contexts of the editors from each language version, and then I studied characteristics such as topics and availability between linguistic versions, the editing activity, among others. I found that the Cultural Context Content (CCC) represents on average a quarter of each Wikipedia language edition, dealing with topics such as culture, politics, people or geography of its speaking territories (some of these results were also presented at Wikimania in Esino Lario 2015 and in this post).

Most importantly, around a 50% of CCC articles are unique to each language version and do not exist in any other Wikipedia. Therefore, the language gap between versions is intrinsically linked to a culture gap, as it represents the most genuine part of the gap across languages. One could argue that language editions should not be a replica of each other and the gap may never be completely closed. However, I believe a minimal coverage of all other languages should be a goal on the agenda of each Wikipedia edition to create more multicultural (and complete) encyclopaedias.

What is your solution to this problem?

edit

While it is extremely difficult to change the conditions which would allow editors from all countries to contribute to Wikipedia and therefore improve the cultural diversity of the project, we can certainly spread the existing cultural diversity across language editions and reduce the content culture gap.

For this, I propose to create a site named Wikipedia Cultural Diversity Observatory (WCDO), where to provide automated rich statistics and visualizations on the current state of diversity, cultural context content datasets for each language edition as well as pointing out solutions in order to improve the exchange of content across Wikipedia language editions.

The ideas for this project have originated in my PhD thesis, where I widely analyzed 40 Wikipedia language editions and examined the culture gap. The observatory I am proposing aims at setting a public space where to easily understand the current state of cultural diversity of the entire Wikipedia project in a usable way. For this, I propose improving, updating and automating the methods in order to present valuable results and tools which trigger new action in the communities.

Based on the experience with the gender bias or gap (Klein et al., 2015) it is reasonable to think that if there were research quantifying the extent of the problem, communities would be more aware of it and would organize effective actions to fight it.

References

Hecht, B., & Gergle, D. (2009). Measuring self-focus bias in community-maintained knowledge repositories (pp. 11–20). C&T '09: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Communities and Technologies.

Hecht, B. J. (2013). The Mining and Application of Diverse Cultural Perspectives in User-Generated Content. Doctoral Dissertation. Northwestern University. United States.

Klein, M., & Konieczny, P. (2015). Gender gap through time and space: A journey through wikipedia biographies and the" wigi" index. arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.03086.

Massa, P. and Scrinzi, F. 2011. Exploring linguistic points of view of Wikipedia. Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration.

Miquel Ribé, Marc; Laniado, David. “Cultural Identities in Wikipedia“. International Conference on Social Media & Society, SM&S. London, UK, 12 July, 2016. (Download PDF) Miquel Ribé, Marc. “User Engagement on Wikipedia, A Review of Studies of Readers and Editors.” Workshop in the Ninth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. 24-26 May, 2015.

Miquel Ribé, Marc, and Horacio Rodríguez Hontoria. “Cultural configuration of Wikipedia: measuring autoreferentiality in different languages.” Proceedings of recent advances in natural language processing: Hissar, Bulgaria, 12-14 September, 2011.

Pentzold C., Weltevrede E., Mauri M., Laniado D., Kaltenbrunner A., Borra E. (2017). Digging Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia as digital cultural heritage gateway and site, ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH), 10, 1, 2017

Van Dijk, Z. (2009). Wikipedia and lesser-resourced languages. Language Problems & Language Planning, (3), 33. http://doi.org/10.1075/lplp.33.3.03van

Project goals

edit
 
Table 1. Culture gap: 40 Wikipedia language editions coverage (% articles) of 40 Wikipedia language editions CCC. Each row shows the coverage of each Wikipedia language editions’ CCC. The coverage is calculated as the number of articles in a Wikipedia language edition (row) which belong to a Wikipedia language edition CCC (column) divided by the total number of articles in the Wikipedia language edition CCC (column). For an easy identification of values, cells are coloured in red to indicate a percentage lower than 1%, and in green in a continuum until 93.67% (the highest value).

The ultimate goal of the Wikipedia Cultural Diversity Observatory is to foster intercultural exchange between communities, so that each Wikipedia language edition reflects better the world cultural diversity. To this purpose, I propose three goals which connect the research I have been undertaking previously with new research, dissemination and activism. They are the following:

Firstly, to design an automatized method in order to collect the Cultural Context Content (CCC) for each of the existing 287 Wikipedia language editions which allows to cartography the cultural diversity within the entire Wikipedia project.

Secondly, to create the WCDO site (possibly wcdo.wmflabs.org, in a similar way to [[1]]) and other dissemination spaces, where to provide dynamic and weekly updated statistics and visual representations based on CCC, with the aim of raising awareness on the culture diversity and content gaps. In particular, I propose that the site initially covers (during this grant):

2.1 A monthly updated table with all Wikipedias ranked by the extent of CCC in absolute number of articles and by percentage, along with various subgroups of content (geographical articles, biographies, among others).

2.2 A monthly updated visual representation of the CCC topical subgroups of content and geographical articles (see Figures 2 and 3).

2.3 A monthly updated visual representation of the culture gap which allows editors to rapidly see their language edition coverage of the CCC of the other language editions (see Table 1).

 
Figure 3. Editor and reader engagement in CCC Geolocated articles from Italian and Japanese Wikipedia (top and bottom respectively). Each point is a CCC geolocated article. Colour represents the number of edits, depicted as a continuum from red to green with a middle point of 250 edits in colour beige. Size represents the number of page views. Important geolocated articles are marked with infoboxes.

2.4 A monthly updated culture gap index to easily compare how the different Wikipedia language editions cover the cultural content from the rest of Wikipedia language editions.

2.5 An on-going presentation of different visualizations of the articles created in each language edition that can be either a) labelled as CCC and by main topic categories assignation (biography, places, history, etcetera.), or b) as articles that bridge the culture gap with any other language edition. This is a similar output provided by the WIGI (Gender Gap Index).

2.6 A list of articles for each Wikipedia language edition CCC by order of priority (algorithmically computed according to valuable metrics such as extension, quality and editor engagement metrics) which should exist in any other Wikipedia language edition. The list could highlight the first 100, although big Wikipedias may have more than 100 articles which should be reasonably present in all other languages. This Top 100 in particular would ensure that each Wikipedia language edition has a minimal coverage of the whole Wikipedia project cultural diversity.

Once started, the WCDO may grow according to further detected needs, insights and new ideas contributed by other researchers and participants in general.

Thirdly and finally, to disseminate the observatory across communities, their activities, and to point out new solutions to foster interlanguage collaboration. In particular, I initially consider it would be interesting to look for the integration of the selected articles in CCC with the WMF developed recommender-content translation tool, which would ease the process of bridging the culture gap.

The Figures and Tables attached here are extracted from PhD thesis and remain as a concept test or prototype for the data representations that will be implemented in the Observatory.

Project plan

edit

Activities

edit

The project is divided in three main phases, which are designed in relation to the goals already described. The first and second are consecutive, while the third will expand to the entire project duration of 6 months (December to May). At the end of the grant period, some dissemination activities will continue.

The project will comprise different activities which fall under the categories/roles of "research", “design”, "development" and "activism/dissemination". The first two types of activities will be mostly planned and executed by the project manager/researcher, while the third will be developed in collaboration with community leaders (hours counted are only for the project manager/researcher).

Phase 1: Selection of Cultural Context Content (CCC) - Month 1

  • Revise the criteria and improve the method in order to obtain the Cultural Context Content for each Wikipedia language edition (e.g. I propose using heuristics based on Wikidata, additional to the category tree used in the prior method) (80 hours).
  • Extend the method to the existing 288 Wikipedia language editions (40 hours).
  • Automate the method in order to collect the articles on a weekly basis and upload the datasets following Wikipedia guidelines for preferred repositories (40 hours).

Estimated time: 160h

Phase 2: Create the website "Wikipedia Cultural Diversity Observatory" - Month 2-6

  • Set up the Observatory website (wcdo.wmflabs.org), choose the template and portal design (30 hours).
  • Create a table with the extent of CCC (and its subgroups of content) both in the observatory and in meta (anologously to meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias_by_sample_of_articles) and make the weekly automation code (40 hours).
  • Choose and test the best visualization graphs in order to represent the data (30 hours).
  • Develop and implement an on-going presentation of visualizations of cultural context articles created for each Wikipedia (70 hours).
  • Develop and implement interactive visual representations of the culture gap between the different Wikipedia language editions and a culture gap index (140 hours).
  • Develop an algorithm which generates the list of the top 100 articles from each Wikipedia Cultural Context Content to be created in other Wikipedia language editions (100 hours)

Estimated time: 410h

Phase 3: Disseminate the observatory & community engagement - Month 1-6

  • Set a plan for community engagement and dissemination including all the possible groups, sites and media (20 hours).
  • Write one press release at the end of each phase and forward it to the communities and media (40 hours).
  • Write a paper about the observatory to disseminate across the academia (240 hours).
  • Coordinate with the Wikimedia Research team in order to promote recommender improvements (20 hours)
  • Attend to Wikimania 2018 and present the Observatory.

Estimated time: 290h

After the six months of the grant, it will be considered to extend the project in order to add new activities (such as improving the visualizations) or better dissemination.

Budget

edit

The budget of the project is dedicated to covering the different activities plus the trip to Wikimania 2018. This adds to 930 hours.

Estimated total of 930 hours = 15,700€

Estimated funding for Wikimania trip (Cape Town, South Africa - July 18-22) = 1,100€

Grand total: 16,800€ gross

Around 35% of this budget are taxes according to the Spanish legislation.

Community engagement

edit

The most important idea to spread among the communities is that each Wikipedia language edition should have a minimal coverage of the cultural context of the rest of the Wikipedia language editions in order to have more multicultural encyclopedias. This minimum could be 100 fundamental articles associated to each Wikipedia cultural context content (this is roughly 28,000 articles).

Although this goal is clear and easy to communicate, the project's contribution setting up an observatory will surely trigger and enrich many more existing interlanguage initiatives.

In the Observatory creation phases (1 and 2) the community will be involved in different ways. Members of different language editions will be consulted to:

  • Review the quality of the CCC dataset and the method process.
  • Give feedback on the appropriateness of the different data visualizations.
  • Perform usability tests (think-aloud) of the web design and data visualizations.

a) Core Initiatives to perform: Existing Interlanguage WikiProjects (starting with English Systemic bias project). Existing interlanguage events (e.g. Wikmedia CEE Spring, Intercultur by Wikimedia España, Catalan Culture Challenge, among others). With the aim of expanding these initiatives and in collaboration with their team leaders I will develop a tutorial with advices on how to organize them so other groups of language edition communities are able to organize them. These projects will benefit from a prioritized list of articles in order to import/export to other Wikipedia language editions. They will also be able to analyze the relationships/coverage of other language editions in order to develop their content creation projects.

b) Secondary dissemination initiatives to perform: Each chapter and language community will be contacted and sent a project presentation. They will be asked to forward and spread each the project press release in their Social Media channels.

c) Off-line events The project will be initially presented in three specific events in order to communicate its value, receive valuable feedback and engage more participants:

During and after the project I will attend Catalan Wikipedia meetings to present the state of the project, as I am a member of the association Amical Wikimedia since 2011. At the end of the project grant, I plan to visit more chapters in order to present the project and raise awareness on the importance of covering the multicultural diversity in each Wikipedia language edition.

d) Wikimedia Channels: Finally, the Wikipedia Culture Diversity Observatory will be presented in Wikimedia Research channels (Showcase and Newsletter) and will invite the academics to contribute to the Observatory with further Visualizations.

Project impact

edit

Target audience

edit

This project's target audience are a mix of editors, academics and journalists. Literally anyone who is interested in cultural diversity and Wikipedia may find interesting information.

- In regards to editors, several community engagement actions have been detailed in order to facilitate the communities the information and tools in order to establish an effective intercultural dialogue. - In regards to academics, previous research have already shown specific aspects of cultural contextualization. This project also aims at providing the research community valuable datasets especially for Humanities based research. - In regards to journalists, they will find an interesting tool in order to understand how each Wikipedia language edition has a unique cultural configuration, and how the entire Wikipedia project is working towards a more multicultural project. In this sense, I plan to send a final press release (at the end of the project) to Wired, The Next Web, Quartz, PopSci, HuffPost Science & Tech, among others.

Measure of success

edit

This project is fundamentally producing valuable statistics, visualizations and datasets. Hence, the main interest is in the observatory viewers, and complementarily in the community initiatives which may rely on the article selections and graphs in order to orientate their content production.

Some of the measures of success in regards to viewers expected at the end of an year after the project start are:

  • A website with a self-updating graphs and data downloads.
  • 1,000 pageviews per month on our statistics website.
  • 100 data downloads per month of our dataset.
  • 5 data re-use cases of our dataset.

Depending on the integration with the Recommender/Content Translator it will be possible to achieve better results at bridging the culture gap. However, one milestone to be expected is at least 5 Wikipedia language editions to complete the list of 28,800 articles which ensure a minimal intercultural coverage of the rest of Wikipedia language editions.

Fit with strategy

edit

The Wikipedia Cultural Diversity Observatory is aligned with the Wikimedia movement goals. In fact, in the strategy discussions one can observe that a global reach and promoting diversity is at the base to stay relevant in a changing world (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Cycle_3/Report).

This project provides a longitudinal and extensive real-time analysis, along with useful article lists in order to promote the interlanguage collaboration for a better cultural diversity coverage. According to the quote attributed to Sir William Thomson, "If you can measure it, you can improve it". Even though some data-based initiatives have been proposed around similar problematics such as the Content Gender Gap, none has provided a similar solution to the culture gap or any similar question based on cultural diversity.

Sustainability

edit

Considering that the statistics and data visualizations are proposed to be automated, the project, as a website and dataset will continue operative after the grant ends. Some maintenance is required to keep it running, however, the website and datasets will be hosted on Tool Labs, and open source repositories such as FigShare. It is expected that the project will grow by receiving support by other community or academic peers which want to implement their visualization derived from cultural diversity data.

Get involved

edit

Participants

edit
  • marcmiquel as grantee/researcher. I'm Marc Miquel-Ribé. I'm from Igualada, a small city near Barcelona. I hold a doctorate in Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Human-Computer Interaction. I did a non-paid PhD research on Wikipedia for multiple reasons, but mainly because I am very interested in understanding better the Editor Engagement and the Cultural Diversity of the project. I am member of Amical Wikimedia (Catalan Wikipedia) since 2011.
  • sdivad as research advisor. David Laniado, phD, senior researcher in computational social science. Sdivad has extensive experience in the study of online collaboration, in particular he has published over 15 academic papers on different aspects of social interactions in Wikipedia. He is co-creator of the Contropedia platform for the analysis and visualization of controversies in Wikipedia articles.
  • Diego as research advisor. Diego Saez-Trumper, phD, researcher in Social Networks Analysis, Graph Theory and applied Machine Learning. Part of the WMF Research Team since August 2017.
  • Volunteer I would like to join this project as a volunteer from Sindhi Wikipedia. Mehtab Ahmed (talk) 18:26, 12 October 2017 (UTC)
  • Volunteer I want to help. TaronjaSatsuma (talk) 20:09, 12 October 2017 (UTC)
  • Volunteer I'm diversity–related WikiProjects founder on th.wikipedia. I want to help. B20180 (talk) 14:12, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
  • Volunteer I can give my working experience in vec.wiktionary, vec.wikipedia and it.wikipedia. Tn4196 (talk) 19:33, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
  • Volunteer I can be volunteer Justine.toms
  • Volunteer I would like to join this project as a volunteer from the Faroese Wikipedia. EileenSanda (talk) 08:58, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
  • More than 20 other volunteers confirmed: Albanian (Liridon), Arabic (Helmoony), Basque (Xabier_Cañas), Bavarian (Muadabuali), Catalan (TaronjaSatsuma), Danish (Honymand), Dutch (Romaine), Estonian (Märt Põder), French (Vincent Roqueta), Galician (Estevoaei), Georgian (BRUTE), Hebrew (Amire80, אבנר), Hindi (Abhinav619), Italian (Atropine), Norwegian (Astrid_Carlsen_(WMNO)), Polish (Tar Lócesilion), Portuguese (Jmagalhães), Spanish (Rodelar), Thai (B20180), Ukrainian (Шиманський Василь), Bulgarian (justine.toms), Dutch (Romaine), Malayalam (Netha_Hussain), Oriya (SAILESHPAT), among others.
  • Volunteer I have some expertise on geolocalizations, user statistics, crossplatofrm interactions and various language editions, maybe I can share (if I have the time).--Alexmar983 (talk) 14:59, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

Community notification

edit

In this part, you may find the communities and community discussion groups which have been (or are being) notified of this proposal.

Endorsements

edit

Do you think this project should be selected for a Project Grant? Please add your name and rationale for endorsing this project below! (Other constructive feedback is welcome on the discussion page).

  • I endorse this. A tool to provide automated rich statistics and visualizations on the current state of language diversity is much needed, and Marc Miquel has a long track record of relevant research about Wikipedia. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 11:39, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
  • I think this project should be selected for a grant as its outcomes would be a useful tool to a wide array of communities. --MuRe (talk) 16:25, 28 September 2017 (UTC)
  • "What gets measured gets fixed." Systemic bias is difficult to quantify, but taking a first stab at it can greatly increase the focus on the problem. I believe there are editors who would take the results of this project seriously and begin to fill in areas, if only some light was shed on the dark. Maximilianklein (talk) 17:36, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
  • I endorse. It will be useful to understand where we are and where to focus. -Geraki TL 10:31, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
  • I endorse this project. That will help a lot the visualisation and the awareness of small languages.-Xabier Cañas (talk) 14:47, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
  • Cultural diversity is a key subject. Ksarasola (talk) 14:55, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
  • This initiative may be instrumental in strengthening ties between lesser-used language projects and overall improving their position within the global wikimedian community as discussed in Montreal, so I feel supportive of this. Iñaki LL (talk) 22:48, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
  • Wholehearted support! James Salsman (talk) 13:53, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
  • This is a well thought out research study. The problem space is well defined and motivated, and the general direction proposed by the project team seems productive and reasonably well scoped. I'm glad they're tackling this problem! Jtmorgan (talk) 15:53, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
  • I think that it is very important to reflect not only on the diversity of our contributors, but also on that of our contents. Different language editions of Wikipedia should not be "national" encyclopedias, a risk which is particularly high when a language is mostly used in just one country. Having updated information on this particular aspect of diversity in Wikimedia projects would be of great help in countering this tendency, and the practical actions of the project are good steps toward concretely going this direction. --Atropine (talk) 16:20, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
  • I find cultural diversity observatory meaningful because different language versions are important asset in Wikipedia and currently it's very hard to get systematic overview of the different perspectives they offer. However, I see here also potential to build on knowledge of not only different language Wikipedias, but also all rivalling Mediawiki and similar instances based on specific interests, hobbies, fandom, ideology etc. This is really a way to enrich our perception of the world and to enable competing sources not just to dissolve into one, but give basis for more informed decisions that can be tracked all the way down to the initial sources. Märt Põder (talk) 02:02, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
  • I strongly endorse this project. Cultural and linguistic diversity in Wikimedia projects is key, so I find this study very importante to know its current state and possible solutions. Work among different communities can help with this proposal. Rodelar (talk) 14:55, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support Very interesting project about diversity. Camelia (talk) 22:38, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support Cultural Diversity is of great importance. Armineaghayan, 7 October 2017
  •   Support A major flaw when we discuss cultural gaps in our communities is the lack of objective metric to rely on. The approach that is taken here is a clear advancement in the direction to the building of an objective metric. I find this proposal especially interesting as it provides evidence from within and across communities. Good luck and thank you for this serious work. --Joalpe (talk) 15:24, 7 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support Back in 2010, I translated the WP:Systemic Bias essay into Spanish with special focus on geographical and cultural biases. Back then, I felt we were missing objective metrics on the systemic bias within each Wikipedia project and the coverage gap between every pair of projects. This proposal is definitely a leap in the right direction. Sabbut (talk) 13:58, 8 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support Would definitely help us in finding a possible framework in order to measure cultural diversity gaps. Braveheart (talk) 19:49, 8 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support An important project. I have redacted several articles where various point of view exists depending on the language spoken. Have a look to Convivencia, under its spanish meaning vs the US concept. Then try to write an article... in French. Vatekor (talk) 18:15, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support Practical and useful tools. To focus only on cultural content, it's probably interesting to have a second analyze by removing a certain kind of articles, not related to a specific culture, (species, taxons, numbers, years, decades, .. ). It's going to have clearer view especially for 'botopedias'. Also you can add a quality index related to the size of the equivalent article. Same size or more, you get 100%; less than that, article size in B language /article size in A language X 100%. --Helmoony (talk) 19:23, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support Very useful across communities. JMagalhães (talk) 19:53, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support if this tool works, it will give very clear indications as to where the local wikipedias will need to be headed. 1l2l3k (talk) 02:08, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
  • The project will diversify content and enhance representation Ndesanjo (talk) 08:32, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support Very interesting. It's important in determining the overall picture of cultural diversities in each Wikipedia edition, firstly, and in solving gaps, secondly. –BruTe talk 09:11, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support Interesting Liridon (talk) 15:21, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support Very interesting project about diversity JuanCamacho (talk) 17:06, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support Useful and interesting. --Pafsanias (talk) 17:35, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support I wait for this idea to be realised — my home wiki need more information about culture of our neighbours at least. And this can help us. Шиманський Василь (talk) 03:29, 11 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support Looks a really useful project with a large target. Pamputt (talk) 06:22, 11 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support nShrestha (talk) 04:11, 12 October 2017 (UTC)
  • Splendid project! ··· 🌸 Rachmat04 · ☕ 03:34, 11 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support I endorse the project, and I offer myself as voluntary in Galician Wikipedia. --Estevoaei (talk) 09:43, 11 October 2017 (UTC)
  • I endorse the project as this can result in that missing parts are discovered in Wikipedia and reduced. Romaine (talk) 10:21, 11 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support - Abhinav Srivastava
  •   Support - Justine.toms
  •   Support - Cultural bias is very easy to overlook Honymand (talk) 16:37, 11 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Comment Disclaimer: Like Marc Miquel, I am a member of Amical Wikimedia in my volunteer capacity and I have given informal advice to Marc about how to swim the Wikimedia waters as a researcher. Said that, and for what is worth, I can say that Marc's intentions are genuine and fruit of a long term interest in Wikimedia and diversity. He seems to be as reliable as stubborn. :) Qgil-WMF (talk) 09:19, 12 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support - I'm on the Welsh Wikipedia and this is exactly what's needed. Well done! Celtica (talk) 14:39, 12 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support - @Marcmiquel: I published this page on Hebrew wikipedia. I am also going to participate on the conference in Sweden. I plan to listen to you. Hanay (talk) 15:42, 12 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support We need broader studies about the content in Wikipedia. The project is growing but we need to know what have we buildt. TaronjaSatsuma (talk) 20:08, 12 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support I support this project, you can count with the Wiki Education Brazil as supporters and volunteers. Rodrigo Padula (talk) 17:10, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support I think this is very important for Wikipedias because all of language versions must continue to develop together, and any seclusion or something is bad. I contribute on sr.wikipedia which we brought in good condition regarding this but hr.wikipedia and possibly some other are too much nationally colored and openly forcing local content (you can check e.g. their Main page and topics they write about, and Google-translate it or translate it other way), what should be prevented because Wikipedia must stay global and just language project – open for everyone and unaffected from internal side by biased editors who are sometimes even admins (who sometimes even harass users based on nationality/ethnicity/religion, as in hr.wikipedia case). This robot-like function of the Wikipedia editor must to be done in neutral way, and enjoyable of course, while "only" depending on external work i.e. citing sources: selected by reliability – not in a biased way, and not with internal influence of "external/world politics" promoted by editors. (I talk from Balkan perspective, don't know the exact situations elsewhere.) I would propose direct coordinations of all Wikimedias (from each country), and even forcing them in the appropriate way to work together and with same policy of neutrality... Someone pointed out systemic bias as a problem, and it is (especially very small number of women editors, on sr.wikipedia too). I don't want to talk about Turkish Wikipedia case, as I don't understand how this happened and if there is some very deep reason behind it or it is simply politics hating facts... /These first dozen votes should also have Support template?/ --Obsuser (talk) 21:31, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support, from vec.wiki--GatoSelvadego (talk) 22:45, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support, I will be glad to help with the Hebrew Wikipedia. אבנר (talk) 17:27, 15 October 2017 (UTC)
  • This seems like a great way to show areas where work is direly needed and a way to remind us of the work we still need to do. Chico Venancio (talk) 18:26, 15 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support Interesting and important project! Astrid Carlsen (WMNO) (talk)
  •   Support Creative project, I will be glad to help with the Tulu Wikipedia BHARATHESHA ALASANDEMAJALU (talk) 03:39, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support it could be a very useful tool for editors. Tar Lócesilion (queta) 15:50, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support, interesting project about diversity. Surfacing the gaps in cultural diversity seems really useful for our mission.--읏 (talk)
  •   Support Hi, I'm an admin in vec.wiktionary, and a contributor mostly in vec.wikipedia and it.wikipedia. Of course one of the leading motivations for a Wikipedia contributor is to talk about what he knows best. I have noticed during my experience and work in vec.wiktionary that of course a Wiktionary in a not widely-spread language tends to present topics about its own cultural context. In vec.wikt most of the articles talk about the life in Veneto and nearby areas, their traditions, traditional tools, costumes, etc. I notice also that it is not always easy to explain the same topics in it.wikt, for example, just because users from there are not used to that kind of information in it.wikt (dictionaries in Italian are traditionally literary and used in the studies, whereas dictionaries in "Italian dialects" (namely: unrecognized languages of Italy) are often about peasants's traditional life). It similarly occurs in it.wiki, where some pages are tagged as they present "a too localistic view" about a topic (see it:Wikipedia:Localismo). This is sometimes wrongly extended to pages talking about topics of small areas. As a result, some pages of vec.wiki may not even be translated to it.wiki, as the it.wiki community is not ready to accept them. This may become another target of the Cultural Diversity Observatory. Lastly, I remind that projects of translation in all languages's Wikipedias may be probably interested in an involving into WCDO project. --Tn4196 (talk) 19:55, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support Millars (talk) 22:43, 18 October 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support Jorid Martinsen (WMNO) (talk)
  •   Support Leeturtle (talk)
  •   Support (on behalf of kw.wiki) Although some aspects of this project are possibly not of immediate use to a small project such as kw.wiki, which has a very small user base and 3,796 articles. The list of topics which are 'Cultural Context Content' could well be of use in deciding where to direct the limited resources available. I am happy to help in any way when it comes to the kw.wiki, although you should contact me by email or on en.wiki in most circumstances. A Den Jentyl Ettien Avel Dysklyver (talk) 22:08, 30 October 2017 (UTC) New contact. Arthur Kerensa (talk) 15:55, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
Using topical coverage analysis as a tool to grow in certain areas. Great idea. I will get back to you when I am at that phase! Best. --Marcmiquel (talk) 10:48, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support --Rosiestep (talk) 13:56, 4 November 2017 (UTC)
  • Very interesting project. We don't have essential list for cultural context content before this, it was hard to make the "diversity" concept into concrete indicator. However, this project helps us to get more solid understanding and common goals for our Wikimedia project to pursue cultural equity. We had Medicine Translation Taskforce for the field of Medicine, but never in the sector of cultural related content, so this one is really refreshing. Liang(WMTW) (talk) 17:35, 4 November 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support Chinese Wikipedia along with other related Wikiproject has a lot of underrepresented articles. Cultural cap in this sense worth attention. I would love to see a rigorous study in this field. --Fantasticfears (talk) 17:40, 4 November 2017 (UTC)
  • Interesting project. -Hasive • talk • 14:10, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
  • A very interesting topic and way to look at Wikipedias' cultural diversity/cultural content gap. Very excited to see more results and data coming! Elisachang (talk) 02:09, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support This sounds like a very interesting project. I am an administrator of the Faroese Wikipedia, and I would like to be a volunteer. EileenSanda (talk) 09:11, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
  •   Support a new idea, I believe statistics and numbers trigger new projects launching. --May Hachem93 (talk) 10:43, 16 March 2018 (UTC)
  • Vouching for Pashto speaking audience and academia. We have long felt this systematic bias, and perhaps one of the reasons why so many of us feel reluctant to commit fully to add information in our language. There is also very little to no attention to the technical and professional support needed by Pashto content contributors. Thank you for raising this issue. Zalaan (talk) 02:38, 14 December 2018 (UTC)
Retrieved from "https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grants:Project/Wikipedia_Cultural_Diversity_Observatory_(WCDO)&oldid=20066931"