Science Is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial

Thompson, Neil; Hanley, Douglas

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3039505

Cited by 58 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Being cited on Wikipedia can thus be considered an indicator of impact [27]. Despite the indirect influence that Wikipedia has on scientific progress [59], Wikipedia is in turn rarely acknowledged in the scientific literature [23,60].…”

Section: Science In Wikipediamentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia

Piccardi

Реди

Colavizza

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020

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Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites on the Web and a common source of information for many users. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia was not conceived as a source of original information, but as a gateway to secondary sources: according to Wikipedia's guidelines, facts must be backed up by reliable sources that reflect the full spectrum of views on the topic. Although citations lie at the heart of Wikipedia, little is known about how users interact with them. To close this gap, we built client-side instrumentation for logging all interactions with links leading from English Wikipedia articles to cited references during one month, and conducted the first analysis of readers' interactions with citations. We find that overall engagement with citations is low: about one in 300 page views results in a reference click (0.29% overall; 0.56% on desktop; 0.13% on mobile). Matched observational studies of the factors associated with reference clicking reveal that clicks occur more frequently on shorter pages and on pages of lower quality, suggesting that references are consulted more commonly when Wikipedia itself does not contain the information sought by the user. Moreover, we observe that recent content, open access sources, and references about life events (births, deaths, marriages, etc.) are particularly popular. Taken together, our findings deepen our understanding of Wikipedia's role in a global information economy where reliability is ever less certain, and source attribution ever more vital.

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Section: Science In Wikipediamentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia

Piccardi

Реди

Colavizza

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Within each group, each city was randomly assigned to one of six treatment arms. The 2017; Hinnosaar, 2018) and the impact of Wikipedia on market outcomes (Xu and Zhang, 2013;Hinnosaar, Hinnosaar, Kummer, and Slivko, 2017) and science (Thompson and Hanley, 2018). 4 For further details of the randomization, see Hinnosaar, Hinnosaar, Kummer, and Slivko (2017).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Externalities in Knowledge Production: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

Hinnosaar

Kummer

et al. 2019

SSRN Journal

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Do contributions to online content platforms induce a feedback loop of ever more user-generated content or will they discourage future contributions? To assess this, we use a randomized field experiment which added content to some pages in Wikipedia while leaving similar pages unchanged. We find that adding content has a negligible impact on the subsequent long-run growth of content. Our results have implications for information seeding and incentivizing contributions, implying that additional content does not generate sizable externalities, neither by inspiring nor by discouraging future contributions.

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“…The popularity of Wikipedia is even reflected in the language that scientists use in their works [5]. Despite its popularity, Wikipedia is often criticized for the low quality of content [6].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multilingual Ranking of Wikipedia Articles with Quality and Popularity Assessment in Different Topics

2019

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On Wikipedia, articles about various topics can be created and edited independently in each language version. Therefore, the quality of information about the same topic depends on the language. Any interested user can improve an article and that improvement may depend on the popularity of the article. The goal of this study is to show what topics are best represented in different language versions of Wikipedia using results of quality assessment for over 39 million articles in 55 languages. In this paper, we also analyze how popular selected topics are among readers and authors in various languages. We used two approaches to assign articles to various topics. First, we selected 27 main multilingual categories and analyzed all their connections with sub-categories based on information extracted from over 10 million categories in 55 language versions. To classify the articles to one of the 27 main categories, we took into account over 400 million links from articles to over 10 million categories and over 26 million links between categories. In the second approach, we used data from DBpedia and Wikidata. We also showed how the results of the study can be used to build local and global rankings of the Wikipedia content.

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Science Is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial

Cited by 58 publications

References 21 publications

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia

Externalities in Knowledge Production: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

Multilingual Ranking of Wikipedia Articles with Quality and Popularity Assessment in Different Topics

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