The Tower of Babel Meets Web 2.0 User-Generated Content and.pdfVIP

The Tower of Babel Meets Web 2.0: User-Generated Content and Its Applications in a Multilingual Context * *† Brent Hecht and Darren Gergle Northwestern University *Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, † Dept. of Communication Studies brent@, dgergle@ ABSTRACT the goal of this research to illustrate the splintering effect of This study explores language’s fragmenting effect on user- this “Web 2.0 Tower of Babel”1 and to explicate the generated content by examining the diversity of knowledge positive and negative implications for HCI and AI-based representations across 25 different Wikipedia language applications that interact with or use Wikipedia data. editions. This diversity is measured at two levels: the concepts that are included in each edition and the ways in We begin by suggesting that current technologies and which these concepts are described. We demonstrate that applications that rely upon Wikipedia data structures the diversity present is greater than has been presumed in implicitly or explicitly espouse a global consensus the literature and has a significant influence on applications hypothesis with respect to the world’s encyclopedic that use Wikipedia as a source of world knowledge. We knowledge. In other words, they make the assumption that close b