Data from: Robust clustering of languages across Wikipedia growth

Wikipedia is the largest existing knowledge repository that is growing on a genuine crowdsourcing support. While the English Wikipedia is the most extensive and the most researched one with over 5 million articles, comparatively little is known about the behaviour and growth of the remaining 283 smaller Wikipedias, the smallest of which, Afar, has only one article. Here, we use a subset of these data, consisting of 14 962 different articles, each of which exists in 26 different languages, from Arabic to Ukrainian. We study the growth of Wikipedias in these languages over a time span of 15 years. We show that, while an average article follows a random path from one language to another, there exist six well-defined clusters of Wikipedias that share common growth patterns. The make-up of these clusters is remarkably robust against the method used for their determination, as we verify via four different clustering methods. Interestingly, the identified Wikipedia clusters have little correlation with language families and groups. Rather, the growth of Wikipedia across different languages is governed by different factors, ranging from similarities in culture to information literacy.维基百科（Wikipedia）是当前全球规模最大的知识库，其发展依托纯粹的众包模式支撑。尽管英文维基百科拥有超500万篇条目，是规模最庞大、研究最充分的维基百科语种版本，但其余283个较小语种的维基百科的运行与发展情况却鲜为人知——其中规模最小的阿法尔语维基百科仅拥有1篇条目。本研究使用该数据集的一个子集，该子集包含14962篇不同条目，每一篇条目均存在于阿拉伯语至乌克兰语等26种不同语种的维基百科中。我们针对这26种语种的维基百科的发展情况展开了为期15年的研究。我们发现，尽管单篇条目在不同语种版本间的传播整体呈现随机路径，但存在六个特征明确的维基百科语种集群，这些集群拥有相似的发展模式。通过四种不同的聚类方法验证可知，这些集群的构成对聚类方法具有极强的鲁棒性。值得注意的是，所识别出的维基百科语种集群与语言谱系及语族几乎不存在关联；相反，不同语种维基百科的发展受到多重因素影响，从文化相似性到信息素养水平不一而足。