Multilinguals and Wikipedia editing

Abstract

This article analyzes one month of edits to Wikipedia in or-der to examine the role of users editing multiple language editions (referred to as multilingual users). Such multilin-gual users may serve an important function in diffusing in-formation across different language editions of the encyclo-pedia, and prior work has suggested this could reduce the level of self-focus bias in each edition. This study finds mul-tilingual users are much more active than their single-edition (monolingual) counterparts. They are found in all language editions, but smaller-sized editions with fewer users have a higher percentage of multilingual users than larger-sized editions. About a quarter of multilingual users always edit the same articles in multiple languages, while just over 40% of multilingual users edit different articles in different lan-guages. When non-English users do edit a second language edition, that edition is most frequently English. Nonethe-less, several regional and linguistic cross-editing patterns are also present.