examining perspectives on “abortion” within the eu through wikipedia

7/27/2019 Examining perspectives on Abortion within the EU through Wikipedia

1/19

1Ana Crisostomostudent n. 10397124

Examining perspectives on Abortionwithin the EU through

Wikipedia

- A comparative study between 21 language versions -

Ana Crisostomo

Student n. 10397124

Digital Methods

Assignment # 4

Supervisors: Bernhard Rieder / Erik Borra

30.11.2012

[email protected]


2/19


Examining perspectives on Abortion within the EU through

Wikipedia

- A comparative study between 21 language versions -

Introduction

Founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia has currently an established position in terms

of relevance and visibility as a privileged online information provider. According to statistics

supplied by Wikipedia itself, the platform offers more than 22 million articles in 285

languages produced by 77 thousand active contributors and attracting 470 million unique

visitors per month[1]

.

This popularity is closely intertwined with the fact that Wikipediasarticles regularly feature

on Googles top search results a phenomenon which reportedly started happening in

2006[2]

and that it has been labeled by some as a symbiotic relationship[3]

.

The increasing ubiquity of Wikipedia references online (as well as offline), along with its

crowdsourcing basis and core principles[4]

, have drawn significant attention from scholars to

consider the platform as an object of study under many different lights.

Some academics seek to investigate the degree of authority by studying its credibility (such

as the 2006 research conducted by Chesney entitled An empirical examination of

Wikipedias credibility which requested fellow academics to review Wikipedia articles

within their expertise but also outside that scope), and its reliability (one example is

Magnus 2008 study Early response to false claims in Wikipedia which included the

insertion of inaccurate information on Wikipedia articles to evaluate the promptness of

reactions).

[1]According to numbers provided in this pagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About on 27/11/2012.

[2] Paraphrasing the author Vaidhyanathan: Sometime in 2006, Wikipedia pages began ranking very high in

many web searches on Google(in The Googlization of Everything, page63).

[3]As stated by the head of Encyclopedia Britannica (Rogers 2).

[4] Wikipedia defines its five pillars as being: 1) Wikipedia is an encyclopedia; 2) Wikipedia is written from a

neutral point of view; 3) Wikipedia is free content that anyone can edit, use, modify, and distribute; 4) Editors

should interact with each other in a respectful and civil manner. 5) Wikipedia does not have firm rules.

(Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars. )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Abouthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Abouthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Abouthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillarshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillarshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillarshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About


3/19


Other type of research focus on the technical component of Wikipedia by emphasizing the

role of the, largely underestimated or even ignored, automated content agents such as

bots (this is the case of the 2010 study from Niederer and van Dijk: Wisdom of the crowd

or technicity of content? Wikipedia as a sociotechnical system).

The present research, however, studies Wikipedia as a cultural reference by comparing the

same entry between different language versions. Taking into consideration that Wikipedia

aims at universality and neutrality, one would expect that the differences between

languages would be minimal but several studies bring forward evidence in the opposite

direction (two examples are Rogers and Sendijarevicspaper on "Neutral or National Point

of View? A Comparison of Srebrenica Articles across Wikipedia's Language Versions" from

2012 and a study from Bao et al from the same year entitled Omnipedia, Bridging the

Wikipedia Language Gap).

Questions

In order to illustrate how the principles of universality, free and open participation, and

neutrality are interpreted and mirrored in the different Wikipedia language versions, a

controversial topic is selected to understand how the non-consensual aspects are managed.

In this particular case, the theme selected is abortion since it is intimately connecte d to

sensitive ethical matters and religious arguments. In order to try, as much as possible, to

subscribe the language research to a delimited geographical territory, the official languages

within the EU are chosen as the ones to be investigated (further specifications on this

matter are provided in the Method and Findings sections).

The voluntary interruption of pregnancy (usually within the 12 weeks gestational period) is

legally allowed in most EU countries[5]

but within this group of countries, connected mainly

through economic reasons, there is a great diversity concerning cultural traditions, social

conventions and religious backgrounds. It is then of interest to examine to which extent

contrasting views are expressed through Wikipedia on this matter, as well as the relevance

that the topic seems to acquire within each language.

[5] For a map view of the abortion regulations in different regions and countries worldwide, consult

http://worldabortionlaws.com/map/.
http://worldabortionlaws.com/map/http://worldabortionlaws.com/map/http://worldabortionlaws.com/map/


4/19


The first set of research questions is then the following: 1a) In which languages does the

topic deserve more attention? 1b) Is there a particular distribution on the type and volume

of user contribution within the set of languages researched?

A second set of questions takes a complementary approach: 2a) Are there particular

aspects of the abortion topic which are avoided in certain languages? 2b) In which ones

does the theme appear to be more contested versus more consensual?

Method

The EU currently includes 27 countries[6]

and, within this group, 21 main official languages

can be found (for the present study Maltese and languages spoken by minorities within this

geographical territory were not considered).

Since there is no linear connection between the languages and the countries, the

association between both items was established as illustrated by Table 1.

Table 1Distribution of official languages per EU country

[6]

The official list can be consulted here:http://europa.eu/about-eu/countries/index_en.htm.
http://europa.eu/about-eu/countries/index_en.htmhttp://europa.eu/about-eu/countries/index_en.htmhttp://europa.eu/about-eu/countries/index_en.htmhttp://europa.eu/about-eu/countries/index_en.htm


5/19


Additionally, 4 languages are extensively spoken outside the EU: English, Spanish, French

and Portuguese (the ones marked in red on Table 1) and this fact should be properly

weighted when initiating any type of analysis focused on a geographical perspective. For 2

of these languages (Spanish and Portuguese), a specific language/country article was found

and analyzed instead of the generic one which should also be considered when comparing

their results with the ones from other languages.

It is equally important to keep in mind that the number of Wikipedia articles per language,

as well as the number of edits and users, is not homogeneously distributed so these

statistics were captured and organized to enable the contextualization of the results[7]

. A

basic measure of the volume of production and the level of commitment was also

created by combining those 3 items differently (see Graphs 1 to 6 onAppendix 1).

The English version of Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org) was then queried for the term

abortion and from this master language entry, the other language entries were retrieved

via the left hand side menu of the page[8]

.

Most versions presented the article on the topic immediately but, in some cases, further

clarification was necessary in order to explicitly consult the article on voluntary

interruption of pregnancy(in opposition to natural miscarriage).

Once all the URLs were collected, a series of sources and tools were utilized to extract

relevant data regarding the articles and the activity around them.

The first tool used belongs to the set of AKA's Wikipedia Tools (http://vs.aka-

online.de/wikipedia.html) and it retrieved History Statistics on Wikipedia pages

(http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl). The information provided was

distributed into 4 groups: 1) Overall statistics, 2) Edits per year, 3) Edits per month and 4)

User statistics. For this study, data from groups 1, 2 and 4 was analyzed.

To complement the aforementioned approach, another methodology was used to

extrapolate information more closely related to the content of the article itself. The number

of words for each article was counted (from the title to the references section but excluding

any other elements of the page) as a possible index of how relevant the topic in each

particular language domain is and the depth to which it is described. Notes regarding the

[7]Source:http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias.

[8]The data was captured between 26/11/2012 and 28/11/2012.
http://en.wikipedia.org/http://en.wikipedia.org/http://en.wikipedia.org/http://vs.aka-online.de/wikipedia.htmlhttp://vs.aka-online.de/wikipedia.htmlhttp://vs.aka-online.de/wikipedia.htmlhttp://vs.aka-online.de/wikipedia.htmlhttp://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.plhttp://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.plhttp://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.plhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipediashttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipediashttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipediashttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipediashttp://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.plhttp://vs.aka-online.de/wikipedia.htmlhttp://vs.aka-online.de/wikipedia.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/


6/19


presence or absence of a lock[9]

on an article, as well as the number of watchers (users

who will be notified once changes to the article are submitted[10]

), were taken as potential

indicators of the degree of controversy and the level of guardianship revolving around the

article.

Supplementary analytical categories were put to use in order to classify the articles

according to the type of content explored and the one avoided. This classification involved

the answer to the following questions:

Does the article describe abortion methods?

Does the article describe different views on abortion?

Does the article describe the situation in the country where the language is spoken?

If so, what type of reference is made? Legal (L), Historical (H), Statistical (S)

Does the article fall under a specific Wikipedia article category?

For the last question, a possible answer could include Feature Article, which is the highest

distinction that Wikipedia can grant to an article attesting its high quality[11]

, or Good

Article which is the category just below[12]

.

Findings

Subsequently to processing all the data and establishing connections between the datasets,

it became clear that some of the questions could possibly be answered using multiple

indicators. Regarding the first question (1a) - In which languages does the topic deserve

more attention? - if one was to measure the amount of attention deposited in the creation

and maintenance of an article by the amount of words used, then German would be, by far,

[9]A lock icon on the upper right hand corner of the article represents a level of protection applied to the same.

A list of all possible locks, and respective protection levels, can be found on this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy

[10]When available, this information is accessible via the View History tab on the upper right hand corner of

the page.

[11]As described in this page:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles .

[12]As described in this page:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_articles/all .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articleshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articleshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articleshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_articles/allhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_articles/allhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_articles/allhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_articles/allhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articleshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy


7/19


the undisputed winner followed by English and then French (seeAppendix 3). It is crucial to

contextualize the values within the overall language representation in Wikipedia. All

indicators (number of articles, number of edits and number of users) point to English as the

dominating language in the platform so, comparatively, the German speaking users have

placed a disproportionally high amount of work in this article. The quality of this German

effort seems to be validated by the Good article label assigned by Wikipedia. On the other

side of the attention spectrum are Slovenian, Lithuanian and Greek both in terms of article

length and depth (some aspects related to abortion are not addressed). The language

versions which presented a significant amount of information with some extension were

Dutch and Polish (both languages ranking relatively high overall in terms of production

and commitment see Graphs 4 and 6 onAppendix 1).

The followingquestion (1b) - Is there a particular distribution on the type and volume of

user contribution within the set of languages researched?allows for other type of findings.

On a general note, a small percentage of users are responsible for the majority of the edits

(see Graph 9 on Appendix 4): this can range from 29% of the users being responsible for

50% of the edits (Slovenian) to 3% of the users being responsible for 50% of the edits

(English). The relatively high distribution (a proportional higher number of users involved in

most edits) is visible on other language versions such as Greek, Lithuanian, Romanian and

Bulgarian. These are also the languages where bots are more present in the list of top

editors.

The versions where the concentration of editors is superior (a proportional lower number

of users involved in most edits) are the English, Estonian, German, Spanish and Slovakian

ones. The number of anonymous users in the top editors list does not seem to be relevant

and several languages do not even have anonymous users in such list. That is the case for

English (for obvious reasons due to the lock on the article), German, Latvian, Romanian,

Slovenian and Slovakian. On the other hand there are 2 cases where an anonymous user

leads the number of editsEstonian and Lithuanianand, in the latter situation, the article

displays a sign informing that neutrality has been disputed.

Answering the next question (2a) - Are there particular aspects of the abortion topic

which are avoided in certain languages? it is of interest to notice that none of the

language versions researched (except for English) avoided describing the situation in the

countries where the respective language was spoken (mainly from a legal perspective but, in


8/19


several cases, also with a historical and statistical approach). However, the same was not

verified regarding the description of different perspectives into the topic. The article in

Danish, Greek, Spanish (it is important to note that this article was specific to Abortion in

Spain and not the Abortion practice in general so this is probably the reason behind this

exclusion), Finnish (in Finland the abortion practice is not freely available), Italian and

Slovenian simply did not mention this aspect. Some versions did not include content on

Abortion methods such as Bulgarian, Greek, Spanish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Portuguese and

Romanian but, in general, the articles were shorter in these languages so this does not

consequently translate an intention to conceal information.

The final question(2b)- In which languages does the theme appear to be more contested

versus more consensual?might be more complex to answer. The English version was the

only one which presented a lock (a silver one standing for semi -protected not allowing

unregistered users to edit) but, taking into account the visibility of this master version, this

is not necessarily an unexpected fact. The number of watchers was not available in many

articles and, for the ones it was, no particular correlation was visible.

Also, in the English version it is interesting to note that the number of edits stands very close

to the number of words. Reinforcing this finding is the fact that the number of words per

editor and number of words per edit (see Graphs 7 and 8 on Appendix 2) is very low

compared to all other languages. This might indicate that either the article has led to some

discussion among users or that many users just focus on continuously improving the article

even if just with minor edits (more in-depth analysis of the data would be required for the

answer to this question to be revealed). Greek, Lithuanian, Danish, Portuguese and

Slovakian lead the list of countries with more words per edit and per editor which can be

interpreted as the content being primarily managed by a small number of editors and not

being disputed by the remaining group of users since the absolute number of edits and

editors is low compared to other languages.

Discussion

The current research aimed at unveiling and exploring potential differences in treatment of

one controversial topicabortionas presented through a Wikipedia article available in 21

official EU languages. Even though several countries within the EU territory do not share, for


9/19


instance, the same religious beliefs (both in type and strength[13]

), there was no strong

evidence which linked the religious factor with the content displayed (or omitted). It was

also not possible to establish a correlation with the legal framework operating in the

countries associated with the languages because: 1) the voluntary interruption of pregnancy

(usually within the 12 weeks gestational period) is legally allowed in most EU countries, and

2) the country which has the most restrictive policy Ireland is an English speaking one

which does not allow a linear country/language connection (the geographical location of the

editor is accessible via the IP address but this piece of information is only available for

anonymous editors which do not represent a significant percentage overall). Next to Ireland,

Poland is the EU country with the less tolerant legal stance on the matter and, nevertheless,

the Polish Wikipedia article was one of the most complete and embracing in its content.

In this particular case, the pattern that seems to emerge is that the type and volume of

content and user activity per language is more closely related to the overall language

distribution in the platform than to cultural aspects external to the same.

If one excludes English from the comparative analysis (for reasons previously explained in

this study), then the evidence shows that some language users are rather active and

engaged in Wikipedia: this is the case for Dutch, Polish and Swedish. However, in absolute

terms (for number of pages and number of editors), German and French are ahead in the

ranking. On the other end, the numbers for Spanish and Portuguese speaking editors display

a lower level of content production and commitment compared to other languages.

Taking into consideration the particular language distribution in Wikipedia, to which extent

is it possible to perform comparative cultural analysis through the same which does not

reflect the specific language participation in the platform itself as described in the previous

paragraph? Particular topics might lend themselves more adequately to this genre ofresearch

[14]but, in every occasion, the language representation, as well as respective user

[13]As an illustrative reference of the representation of the three main religions in Europe (Roman Catholicism,

Orthodox Christianity and Protestantism), as well as the level of religiosity and spirituality within the EU

countries, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_European_Union.

[14]On this matter, see Rogers and Sendijarevicspaper on "Neutral or National Point of View? A Comparison of

Srebrenica Articles across Wikipedia's Language Versions" from 2012 and Callahan and Herring s study entitled

Cultural bias in Wikipedia content on famous persons from 2011.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_European_Unionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_European_Unionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_European_Union


10/19


participation, on Wikipedia should be taken into account in order to avoid a biased

interpretation of results[15]

.

[15]On this topic it is also of interest to consult the 2009 study Wikipedia and lesser-resourced languages by

van Dijk exploring the language distribution on Wikipedia.


11/19


Literature

Offline references

Livingstone, Randall. "Lets Leave the Bias to the Mainstream Media: A Wikipedia

Community Fighting for Information Neutrality." M/C Journal, 13(6), (2010): 1 - 13.

Niederer, Sabine. van Dijck, Jose. "Wisdom of the Crowd or Technicity of Content?

Wikipedia as a Sociotechnical System." New Media & Society. 12(8), (2010): 1368 -

1387.

Rogers, Richard. Sendijarevic, Emina. "Neutral or National Point of View? A Comparison of

Srebrenica Articles across Wikipedia's Language Versions." Paper presented at

Wikipedia Academy 2012, Berlin, Germany, June 29 - July 1, 2012.

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry). Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2011.

Online references

Bao et al. Omnipedia: Bridging the Wikipedia Language Gap. Proceedings of CHI 2012,

Austin, Texas, USA, May 5 12, 2012: 1075 - 1084. 27 November 2012.

.

Callahan, Ewa. Herring, Susan. Cultural bias in Wikipedia content on famous persons.

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 62. 10

(October 2011): 1899 1915. 28 November 2012.

.

Center for Reproductive Rights. The Worlds Abortion Laws 2012. Center for Reproductive

Rights. 20 November 2012. .
http://collablab.northwestern.edu/pubs/CHI2012-BaoEtAl-Omnipedia.pdfhttp://collablab.northwestern.edu/pubs/CHI2012-BaoEtAl-Omnipedia.pdfhttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.21577/abstracthttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.21577/abstracthttp://worldabortionlaws.com/map/http://worldabortionlaws.com/map/http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.21577/abstracthttp://collablab.northwestern.edu/pubs/CHI2012-BaoEtAl-Omnipedia.pdf


12/19


Chesney, Thomas. "An empirical examination of Wikipedias credibility." First Monday, 11

(11), (6 November 2006). 27 November 2012.

.

Europa.Eu. European Union Countries. Communication department of the European

Commission. 26 November 2012. .

Magnus, Paul. "Early Response to False Claims in Wikipedia. First Monday, 13 (9), (1September 2008). 27 November 2012.

.

MetaWiki. List of Wikipedias. 2012. Wikimedia Foundation. 26 November 2012.

.

Van Dijk, Ziko. Wikipedia and lesser-resourced languages. IngentaConnect - Language

Problems & Language Planning 33. 3 (2009): 234 250. 28 November 2012.

.

Wikipedia. Religion in the European Union. 2012. Wikimedia Foundation. 27 November

2012. .

Wikipedia. Wikipedia: About. 2012. Wikimedia Foundation. 27 November 2012.

.

Wikipedia. Wikipedia: Featured Articles.2012. Wikimedia Foundation. 27 November 2012.

.
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/1413/1331#authorhttp://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/1413/1331#authorhttp://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/1413/1331#authorhttp://europa.eu/about-eu/countries/index_en.htmhttp://europa.eu/about-eu/countries/index_en.htmhttp://europa.eu/about-eu/countries/index_en.htmhttp://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2115/2027http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2115/2027http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2115/2027http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipediashttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipediashttp://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/lplp/2009/00000033/00000003/art00003http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/lplp/2009/00000033/00000003/art00003http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/lplp/2009/00000033/00000003/art00003http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_European_Unionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_European_Unionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Abouthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Abouthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articleshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articleshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articleshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Abouthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_European_Unionhttp://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/lplp/2009/00000033/00000003/art00003http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/lplp/2009/00000033/00000003/art00003http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipediashttp://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2115/2027http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2115/2027http://europa.eu/about-eu/countries/index_en.htmhttp://europa.eu/about-eu/countries/index_en.htmhttp://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/1413/1331#authorhttp://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/1413/1331#author


13/19


Wikipedia. Wikipedia: Five Pillars. 2012. Wikimedia Foundation. 26 November 2012.

.

Wikipedia. Wikipedia: Good Articles. 2012. Wikimedia Foundation. 27 November 2012.

.

Wikipedia. Wikipedia: Protection Policy. 2012. Wikimedia Foundation. 27 November 2012.

.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillarshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillarshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillarshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_articles/allhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_articles/allhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_articles/allhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars


14/19


Appendix 1

General statistics on Wikipedia

Graph 1Number of pages, edits and users per EU language

See worksheet Wikipedia_stats_per_language.

Graph 2Number of pages and users per EU language


0

100,000,000

200,000,000

300,000,000

400,000,000

500,000,000

600,000,000

BG CS DA DE EL EN ES ET FI FR HU IT LT LV NL PL PT RO SL SK SV

# Wikipedia pages

# Wikipedia edits

# Wikipedia users

0

500,000

1,000,000

1,500,000

2,000,000

2,500,000

3,000,000

3,500,000

4,000,000

4,500,000


# Wikipedia pages

# Wikipedia users
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AijGdqUTikIqdDVEVTYzUXk5X05YcHFCSXJUSDFEV1Ehttps://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AijGdqUTikIqdDVEVTYzUXk5X05YcHFCSXJUSDFEV1Ehttps://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AijGdqUTikIqdDVEVTYzUXk5X05YcHFCSXJUSDFEV1Ehttps://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AijGdqUTikIqdDVEVTYzUXk5X05YcHFCSXJUSDFEV1Ehttps://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AijGdqUTikIqdDVEVTYzUXk5X05YcHFCSXJUSDFEV1Ehttps://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AijGdqUTikIqdDVEVTYzUXk5X05YcHFCSXJUSDFEV1Ehttps://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AijGdqUTikIqdDVEVTYzUXk5X05YcHFCSXJUSDFEV1Ehttps://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AijGdqUTikIqdDVEVTYzUXk5X05YcHFCSXJUSDFEV1E


15/19


Measuring the volume of production



0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35


Graph 3 - Number of Wikipedia pages per user in 21 EU languages

# pages / user

0

1

1

2

2

3

3

BG CS DA DE EL ES ET FI FR HU IT LT LV NL PL PT RO SL SK SV

Graph 4 - Number of Wikipedia pages per user in 20 EU languages (excluding English)

# pages / user


16/19


Measuring the level of commitment



0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

3500

4000

4500


Graph 5 - Number of article edits per user in 21 EU languages

# edits / user

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

BG CS DA DE EL ES ET FI FR HU IT LT LV NL PL PT RO SL SK SV

Graph 6 - Number of article edits per user in 20 EU languages (excluding English)

# edits / user


17/19


Appendix 2

Statistics on the Wikipedia article on Abortion in 21 EU languages

See worksheet edits_editors_words_per_language.

See worksheet edits_editors_words_per_language.

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100


Graph 7 - Number of words per editor

# words/editor

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40


Graph 8 - Number of words per edit

# words/edit


18/19


Appendix 3

Content categories for the Wikipedia article on Abortion in 21 EU languages

Table 1 - Content categories for the Wikipedia article on Abortion in 21 EU languages

See worksheet content_overview_comparison.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AijGdqUTikIqdDVEVTYzUXk5X05YcHFCSXJUSDFEV1Ehttps://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AijGdqUTikIqdDVEVTYzUXk5X05YcHFCSXJUSDFEV1Ehttps://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AijGdqUTikIqdDVEVTYzUXk5X05YcHFCSXJUSDFEV1Ehttps://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AijGdqUTikIqdDVEVTYzUXk5X05YcHFCSXJUSDFEV1E


19/19

19

Appendix 4

Statistics on the Top Editors responsible for editing 50% of the content of the Wikipedia

article on Abortion in 21 EU languages

Graph 9Breakdown of top editors responsible for 50% of the edits in the respective language article

See worksheet top editors per language.

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%


bots included in the

group which produces

50% of the edits (in %

relative to the total

number of editors)

anonymous editors

included in the topgroup which produces



number of editors)

identified editors

included in the top

group which produces



number of editors)

editors who are not

included in the top

group which produces50% of the edits
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AijGdqUTikIqdDVEVTYzUXk5X05YcHFCSXJUSDFEV1Ehttps://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AijGdqUTikIqdDVEVTYzUXk5X05YcHFCSXJUSDFEV1Ehttps://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AijGdqUTikIqdDVEVTYzUXk5X05YcHFCSXJUSDFEV1Ehttps://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AijGdqUTikIqdDVEVTYzUXk5X05YcHFCSXJUSDFEV1E

examining perspectives on “abortion” within the eu through wikipedia

Documents