# WikiGap: Promoting Epistemic Equity by Surfacing Knowledge Gaps Between English Wikipedia and other Language Editions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24195 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24195/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 93 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14251/) (2023)
- [Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01852/) (2020)
- [Challenges and Strategies in Cross-Cultural NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10020/) (2022)
- [XOR QA: Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11856/) (2020)
- [WorldCuisines: A Massive-Scale Benchmark for Multilingual and Multicultural Visual Question Answering on Global Cuisines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12705/) (2024)
- [ECLeKTic: a Novel Challenge Set for Evaluation of Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21228/) (2025)
- [Women Through the Glass Ceiling: Gender Asymmetries in Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.04890/) (2016)
- [Where in the World are You? Geolocation and Language Identification in Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.0683/) (2013)
- [Locating Information Gaps and Narrative Inconsistencies Across Languages: A Case Study of LGBT People Portrayals on Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04282/) (2024)
- [Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.0976/) (2013)
- [The Tower of Babel Meets Web 2.0: User-Generated Content and its Applications in a Multilingual Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01689/) (2019)
- [Not at Home on the Range: Peer Production and the Urban/Rural Divide](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10954/) (2019)
- [Low-resourced Languages and Online Knowledge Repositories: A Need-Finding Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16669/) (2024)
- [Governance Capture in a Self-Governing Community: A Qualitative Comparison of the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03616/) (2023)
- [Laboratories of Oligarchy? How the Iron Law Extends to Peer Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1407.0323/) (2014)
- [Mining cross-cultural relations from Wikipedia - A study of 31 European food cultures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4484/) (2014)
- [Bridging Nations: Quantifying the Role of Multilinguals in Communication on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03797/) (2023)
- [Whose Knowledge is Valued?: Epistemic Injustice in CSCW Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03477/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Location Not Found: Exposing Implicit Local and Global Biases in Multilingual LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19292/) (2026)
- [Zoom In Disparities in Healthcare LLM Q&A](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17476/) (2025)
- [Information Asymmetry across Language Varieties: A Case Study on Cantonese-Mandarin and Bavarian-German QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14782/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With more than 11 times as many pageviews as the next largest edition, English Wikipedia dominates global knowledge access relative to other language editions. Readers are prone to assuming English Wikipedia as a superset of all language editions, leading many to prefer it even when their primary language is not English. Other language editions, however, comprise complementary facts rooted in their respective cultures and media environments, which are marginalized in English Wikipedia. While Wikipedia's user interface enables switching between language editions through its Interlanguage Link (ILL) system, it does not reveal to readers that other language editions contain valuable, complementary information. We present WikiGap, a system that surfaces complementary facts sourced from other Wikipedias within the English Wikipedia interface. Specifically, by combining a recent multilingual information-gap discovery method with a user-centered design, WikiGap enables access to complementary information from French, Russian, and Chinese Wikipedia. In a mixed-methods study (n=21), WikiGap significantly improved fact-finding accuracy, reduced task time, and received a 32-point higher usability score relative to Wikipedia's current ILL-based navigation system. Participants reported increased awareness of the availability of complementary information in non-English editions and reconsidered the completeness of English Wikipedia. WikiGap thus paves the way for improved epistemic equity across language editions.