Supporting collaboration in wikipedia between language communities

Abstract

This paper describes an application of machine translation technology for supporting collaboration in Wikipedia. Wikipedia hosts separate language Wikipedias for hundreds of different languages. While some content is specific to these different versions of Wikipedia, some topics have pages within multiple different Wikipedias. Similarly, while some users participate only in one Wikipedia, we find users who play a bridging role between these sub- communities and participate in the process of maintaining similar pages in different Wikipedias. Since these are not the majority of users, a support tool that allows stretching the effort of these specialized users further by indicating where their effort is needed could be a tremendous benefit to the community. An evaluation of the proposed approach demonstrates promise that such a tool could substantially reduce the effort involved in playing this bridging role on Wikipedia. Copyright 2012 ACM.