Mining cross-cultural relations from Wikipedia: A study of 31 European food cultures

Abstract

For many people, Wikipedia represents one of the primary sources of knowledge about foreign cultures. Yet, different Wikipedia language editions offer different descriptions of cultural practices. Unveiling diverging representations of cultures provides an important insight, since they may foster the formation of cross-cultural stereotypes, misunderstandings and potentially even conflict. In this work, we explore to what extent the descriptions of cultural practices in various European language editions of Wikipedia differ on the example of culinary practices and propose an approach to mine cultural relations between different language communities trough their description of and interest in their own and other communities' food culture. We assess the validity of the extracted relations using 1) various external reference data sources (i.e., the European Social Survey, migration statistics), 2) crowdsourcing methods and 3) simulations.