research-article

The Positioning Matters: Estimating Geographical Bias in the Multilingual Record of Biographies on Wikipedia

Author:

Pablo BeytíaAuthors Info & Claims

WWW '20: Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020

Pages 806 - 810

https://doi.org/10.1145/3366424.3383569

Published: 20 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

This article proposes that an appropriate assessment of the geographical bias in multilingual Wikipedia's content should consider not only the number of articles linked to places, but also their internal positioning –i.e. their location in different languages and their centrality in the network of references between articles–. This idea is studied empirically, systematically evaluating the geographic concentration in the biographical coverage of globally recognized individuals (those whose biographies are found in more than 25 language versions of Wikipedia). Considering the internal positioning levels of these biographies, only 5 countries account for more than 62% of Wikipedia's biographical coverage. In turn, the inequality in coverage between countries reaches very high levels, estimated with a Gini coefficient of .84 and a Palma ratio of 207. In all the tests carried out, the inclusion of the linguistic and/or relational positioning of the articles increases the estimate of inequality in biographical coverage. This suggests that previous estimates of geographical bias, which do not consider differences in internal positioning, have underestimated the degree of inequality in the distribution of information.

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Cited By

Yu YLi XLi TDhillon PRomero D(2025)Demographic disparity in Wikipedia coverage: a global perspectiveEPJ Data Science10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00530-414:1Online publication date: 21-Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00530-4
Damadi MDavoust A(2023)Fairness in Socio-Technical Systems: A Case Study of WikipediaCollaboration Technologies and Social Computing10.1007/978-3-031-42141-9_6(84-100)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42141-9_6
Beytía PWagner C(2022)Visibility layers: a framework for systematising the gender gap in Wikipedia contentInternet Policy Review10.14763/2022.1.162111:1Online publication date: 22-Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.14763/2022.1.1621
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

The Positioning Matters: Estimating Geographical Bias in the Multilingual Record of Biographies on Wikipedia

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

WWW '20: Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020

April 2020

854 pages

ISBN:9781450370240

DOI:10.1145/3366424

Editors:
Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni
Sorbonne University, France
,
Gita Sukthankar
University of Central Florida, United States
,
Tie-Yan Liu
Microsoft Research Asia, China
,
Maarten van Steen
University of Twente, Netherlands

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

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SIGWEB: ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web

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Published: 20 April 2020

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April 20 - 24, 2020

Taipei, Taiwan

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Cited By

Yu YLi XLi TDhillon PRomero D(2025)Demographic disparity in Wikipedia coverage: a global perspectiveEPJ Data Science10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00530-414:1Online publication date: 21-Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00530-4
Damadi MDavoust A(2023)Fairness in Socio-Technical Systems: A Case Study of WikipediaCollaboration Technologies and Social Computing10.1007/978-3-031-42141-9_6(84-100)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42141-9_6
Beytía PWagner C(2022)Visibility layers: a framework for systematising the gender gap in Wikipedia contentInternet Policy Review10.14763/2022.1.162111:1Online publication date: 22-Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.14763/2022.1.1621
Beytía PWagner C(2022)Visibility layers: a framework for systematising the gender gap in Wikipedia contentInternet Policy Review10.14763/2022.1.162111:1Online publication date: 22-Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.14763/2022.1.1621
Houtti MJohnson ICepeda JKhandelwal SBhatnagar ATerveen L(2022)"We Need a Woman in Music": Exploring Wikipedia's Values on Article PriorityProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35551566:CSCW2(1-28)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3555156
Abián DMeroño-Peñuela ASimperl E(2022)An Analysis of Content Gaps Versus User Needs in the Wikidata Knowledge GraphThe Semantic Web – ISWC 202210.1007/978-3-031-19433-7_21(354-374)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19433-7_21
van Erp Mde Boer V(2021)A Polyvocal and Contextualised Semantic WebThe Semantic Web10.1007/978-3-030-77385-4_30(506-512)Online publication date: 31-May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77385-4_30

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