# The Tower of Babel Meets Web 2.0: User-Generated Content and its Applications in a Multilingual Context

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.01689 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01689/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Locating Information Gaps and Narrative Inconsistencies Across Languages: A Case Study of LGBT People Portrayals on Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04282/) (2024)
- [Bridging Background Knowledge Gaps in Translation with Automatic Explicitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01308/) (2023)
- [WikiGap: Promoting Epistemic Equity by Surfacing Knowledge Gaps Between English Wikipedia and other Language Editions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24195/) (2025)
- [Measuring Wikipedia Article Quality in One Dimension by Extending ORES with Ordinal Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10684/) (2021)
- [LaSER: Language-Specific Event Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04712/) (2023)
- [Cross-Language Evolution of Divergent Collective Memory Around the Arab Spring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10706/) (2024)
- [On the effective transfer of knowledge from English to Hindi Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05708/) (2024)
- [Where's Waldo? Query-language Preference under Cross-lingual Knowledge Disparities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00606/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This study explores language's fragmenting effect on user-generated content by examining the diversity of knowledge representations across 25 different Wikipedia language editions. This diversity is measured at two levels: the concepts that are included in each edition and the ways in which these concepts are described. We demonstrate that the diversity present is greater than has been presumed in the literature and has a significant influence on applications that use Wikipedia as a source of world knowledge. We close by explicating how knowledge diversity can be beneficially leveraged to create "culturally-aware applications" and "hyperlingual applications".