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. 2013 Oct 3;8(10):e74554.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0074554. eCollection 2013.

Highlighting entanglement of cultures via ranking of multilingual Wikipedia articles

Young-Ho Eom  1 , Dima L Shepelyansky
Affiliations

Highlighting entanglement of cultures via ranking of multilingual Wikipedia articles

Young-Ho Eom et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

How different cultures evaluate a person? Is an important person in one culture is also important in the other culture? We address these questions via ranking of multilingual Wikipedia articles. With three ranking algorithms based on network structure of Wikipedia, we assign ranking to all articles in 9 multilingual editions of Wikipedia and investigate general ranking structure of PageRank, CheiRank and 2DRank. In particular, we focus on articles related to persons, identify top 30 persons for each rank among different editions and analyze distinctions of their distributions over activity fields such as politics, art, science, religion, sport for each edition. We find that local heroes are dominant but also global heroes exist and create an effective network representing entanglement of cultures. The Google matrix analysis of network of cultures shows signs of the Zipf law distribution. This approach allows to examine diversity and shared characteristics of knowledge organization between cultures. The developed computational, data driven approach highlights cultural interconnections in a new perspective. Dated: June 26, 2013.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. PageRank probability
formula image as function of PageRank index formula image (a) and CheiRank probability formula image as function of CheiRank index formula image (b). For a better visualization each PageRank formula image and CheiRank formula image curve is shifted down by a factor formula image (EN), formula image (FR), formula image (DE), formula image (IT), formula image (ES), formula image (NL), formula image (RU), formula image (HU), formula image (KO).
Figure 2
Figure 2. Density of Wikipedia articles in the PageRank ranking
formula image versus CheiRank ranking formula image plane for each Wikipedia edition. The red points are top PageRank articles of persons, the green points are top 2DRank articles of persons and the cyan points are top CheiRank articles of persons. Panels show: English (top-left), French (top-center), German (top-right), Italian (middle-left), Spanish (middle-center), Dutch (middle-left), Russian (bottom-left), Hungarian (bottom-center), Korean (bottom-right). Color bars shown natural logarithm of density, changing from minimal nonzero density (dark) to maximal one (white), zero density is shown by black.
Figure 3
Figure 3. Distribution of top 30 persons in each rank over activity fields for each Wikipedia edition.
Panels correspond to (a) PageRank, (b) 2DRank, (3) CheiRank. The color bar shows the values in percents.
Figure 4
Figure 4. Distributions of top 30 persons over different cultures corresponding to Wikipedia editions, “WR” category represents all other cultures which do not belong to considered 9 Wikipedia editions.
Panels show ranking by (a) PageRank, (b) 2DRank, (3) CheiRank. The color bar shows the values in percents.
Figure 5
Figure 5. Network of cultures obtained from 9 Wikipedia languages and the remaining world (WR) selecting 30 top persons of PageRank (a) and 2DRank (b) in each culture.
The link width and darkness are proportional to a number of foreign persons quoted in top 30 of a given culture, the link direction goes from a given culture to cultures of quoted foreign persons, quotations inside cultures are not considered. The size of nodes is proportional to their PageRank.
Figure 6
Figure 6. Google matrix of network of cultures from Fig. 5 , shown respectively for panels
formula image . The matrix elements formula image are shown by color at the damping factor formula image, index formula image is chosen as the PageRank index formula image of PageRank vector so that the top cultures with formula image are located at the top left corner of the matrix.
Figure 7
Figure 7. Dependence of probabilities of PageRank
formula image (red) and CheiRank formula image (blue) on corresponding indexes formula image and formula image . The probabilities are obtained from the network and Google matrix of cultures shown in Fig. 5 and Fig. 6 for corresponding panels formula image. The straight lines indicate the Zipf law formula image.
Figure 8
Figure 8. PageRank versus CheiRank plane of cultures with corresponding indexes
formula image and formula image obtained from the network of cultures for corresponding panels formula image .
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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