Let's Work Together! Wikipedia Language Communities' Attempts to Represent Events Worldwide

With over 300 language communities, Wikipedia offers a multilingual environment for collective reporting of events worldwide. However, most research on documenting events has focused on English Wikipedia. Our work explores the extent of global coverage of event articles in the English Wikipedia and Wikipedia communities associated with three of the most spoken languages globally: Arabic, Chinese and Spanish. We also compare the process of collaboratively writing event articles across these communities. Our results provide evidence that while there is an indication of self-focus bias, there is also strong evidence of a global representation of events across different Wikipedia communities. Moreover, we observe that while limited resources in smaller Wikipedia communities have different collaboration patterns, their efforts lead to similar levels of content quality after a week. We discuss the implications of our results for Wikipedia and the design of multi-language information production communities.