Cross-Language Evolution of Divergent Collective Memory Around the Arab
  Spring
H. Laurie Jones Brian C. Keegan
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.