Collaboration in editing world wide news in four Wikipedia language communities

Abstract

With the popularity of social media, there has been a shift in the ways we gather and share news. Wikipedia uniquely brings together collective efforts to report on current events. While there is strong evidence of English Wikipedia attention to news events, it is not clear how does this effort exists across the different Wikipedia language communities. We study the collaboration process and the resulting content quality of the 6,730 Wikipedia articles related to 2,064 news events in English and three of the most spoken languages in the world: Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish. Our results provide evidence that while limited resources in smaller Wikipedia communities can lead to different collaboration patterns, their efforts lead to very comparable quality of contribution. However, this similar quality level is achieved with a delay corresponding to size of their Wikipedia and potential availability of resources.