DescriptionLanguages Matter to Cultural Diversity Finding Missing Languages and Bridging the Gaps in Minority Languages.pdf
English: Each Wikipedia language edition adds to the overall Wikipedia cultural diversity with articles about their places, leaders, traditions, among many other topics. It is their genuine and unique contribution that is often not translated across languages generating what is known as a content gap. Leaving aside this gap, in the Wikipedia Cultural Diversity Observatory project we find that cultural diversity could improve if we could 1) engage languages with a status of marginalization to represent better their context, 2) increase the number of Wikipedia language editions.
In this talk I want to give a quick overview of our research with few key figures on the overall linguistic situation in Wikipedia in terms of cultural diversity. First, for each Wikipedia whose language is in state of minorization I want to provide a list of articles about their geographical and cultural context that exist in bigger language editions but they do not exist in its language yet. Second, I provide a list of languages of the world that according to their number of speakers and social status could be candidate to start a Wikipedia and represent their context.
Finally, I want to stress out the importance of representing each language's cultural context despite the possible difficulties in finding sources, among other problems. Because I believe that encouraging the growth of Wikipedias cannot be dissociated from the encouragement of representing their context and acknowledging their particular contribution to human knowledge.
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