Cross-Language Evolution of Divergent Collective Memory Around the Arab Spring
This work addresses how collective memory diverges across languages in online platforms like Wikipedia, which is incremental in exploring long-term content evolution.
The study analyzed the evolution of Arab Spring-related Wikipedia articles in Arabic and English from 2011 to 2024, finding that content similarity across languages changed over time, with implications for understanding online collective memory and linguistic models.
The Arab Spring was a historic set of protests beginning in 2011 that toppled governments and led to major conflicts. Collective memories of events like these can vary significantly across social contexts in response to political, cultural, and linguistic factors. While Wikipedia plays an important role in documenting both historic and current events, little attention has been given to how Wikipedia articles, created in the aftermath of major events, continue to evolve over years or decades. Using the archived content of Arab Spring-related topics across the Arabic and English Wikipedias between 2011 and 2024, we define and evaluate multilingual measures of event salience, deliberation, contextualization, and consolidation of collective memory surrounding the Arab Spring. Our findings about the temporal evolution of the Wikipedia articles' content similarity across languages has implications for theorizing about online collective memory processes and evaluating linguistic models trained on these data.