Biographical Social Networks on Wikipedia - A cross-cultural study of links that made history

Abstract: It is arguable whether history is made by great men and women or vice versa, but undoubtably social connections shape history. Analysing Wikipedia, a global collective memory place, we aim to understand how social links are recorded across cultures. Starting with the set of biographies in the English Wikipedia we focus on the networks of links between these biographical articles on the 15 largest language Wikipedias. We detect the most central characters in these networks and point out culture-related peculiarities. Furthermore, we reveal remarkable similarities between distinct groups of language Wikipedias and highlight the shared knowledge about connections between persons across cultures.