Rowan and Littlefield Publishers recently released a new book co-edited by Dr. Pnina Fichman and Dr. Noriko Hara
Global Wikipedia: International and Cross-Cultural Issues in Online Collaboration
Global Wikipedia: International and Cross-Cultural Issues in Online Collaboration is the first book to address the lack of research on Wikipedia in languages other than English; it enhances our knowledge by focusing attention on the global, multilingual, and multicultural aspects of Wikipedia. The editors showcase research on Wikipedia, exploring a wide range of international and cross-cultural issues. Online global collaboration, coordination, and conflict management are examined in this rich socio technical environment. While dozens of books about Wikipedia are available, they focus primarily on the English Wikipedia and assume an Anglo-Saxon perspective, and mostly disregarding cultural and language variability or multi-cultural collaborative efforts. These other works address the impact of Wikipedia on society, processes of mass knowledge production, and the dynamics of the Wikipedia community. However, only few of them focus on Wikipedia’s global features. This lack of attention is problematic because more than 80% of Wikipedia articles are written in languages other than English.
The book includes nine chapters:
Chapter 1: Immaterial Editors: Bots and Bot Policies Across Global Wikipedia
Randall Livingstone
Chapter 2: The Most Controversial Topics In Wikipedia: A Multilingual And Geographical Analysis
Taha Yasseri, Anselm Spoerri, Mark Graham, and János Kertész
Chapter 3: Our News, Their Events: A Comparison of Archived Current Events on English and Greek Wikipedia
Jahna Ottenbacher
Chapter 4: Cross-linguistic Neutrality: Wikipedia's Neutral Points of Views from a global perspective
Ewa Callahan
Chapter 5: Gender Gap In Wikipedia Editing: A Cross-Language Comparison
Paolo Massa, Asta Zelenkauskaite
Chapter 6: Knowledge Sharing on Wikimedia Embassies
Pnina Fichman, Noriko Hara
Chapter 7: Constructing local heroes – collaborative narratives of Finnish corporations in Wikipedia Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, Merja Porttikivi
Chapter 8: The political economy of the Chinese copycats of Wikipedia
Gehao Zhang
Chapter 10: Contributing to Wikipedia: A Question of Gender
Hélène Bourdeloie, Michaël Vicente
Chapter 2 of the book “The Most Controversial Topics in Wikipedia: A Multilingual and Geographical Analysis” by Taha Yasseri, Anselm Spoerri, Mark Graham, and János Kertész has received significant press including CNN, the Washington Post, and BBC News.
Posted June 17, 2014