The Influence of Multilingualism and Mutual Intelligibility on Wikipedia Reading Behaviour: A Research Proposal

Given the important role of Wikipedia in our everyday lives, a better understanding of how language skills affect Wikipedia usage is needed. If content is not available in a reader’s native language or a language that she can readily understand, access barriers and knowledge gaps are created, threatening Wikimedia’s goal to create knowledge equity among all its projects and their consumers. This article argues for research on the effects of multilingualism and mutual intelligibility on Wikipedia reading behaviour, focusing on the Nordic countries, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Initial exploratory analysis shows that while residents of these countries use the native language editions quite frequently, they rely strongly on English Wikipedia, too. Research questions and methods for future work in this area are presented