Samoilenko et al. EPJ Data Science (2016)5:9 DOI 10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0070-8 REGULAR ARTICLE OpenAccess Linguistic neighbourhoods: explaining cultural borders on Wikipedia through multilingual co-editing activity Anna Samoilenko1,2*, Fariba Karimi1,DanielEdler3, Jérôme Kunegis2 and Markus Strohmaier1,2 *Correspondence:
[email protected] Abstract 1GESIS - Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, 6-8 Unter In this paper, we study the network of global interconnections between language Sachsenhausen, Cologne, 50667, communities, based on shared co-editing interests of Wikipedia editors, and show Germany that although English is discussed as a potential lingua franca of the digital space, its 2University of Koblenz-Landau, Koblenz, Germany domination disappears in the network of co-editing similarities, and instead local Full list of author information is connections come to the forefront. Out of the hypotheses we explored, bilingualism, available at the end of the article linguistic similarity of languages, and shared religion provide the best explanations for the similarity of interests between cultural communities. Population attraction and geographical proximity are also significant, but much weaker factors bringing communities together. In addition, we present an approach that allows for extracting significant cultural borders from editing activity of Wikipedia users, and comparing a set of hypotheses about the social mechanisms generating these borders. Our study sheds light on how culture is reflected in the collective process