Semi-automatic generation of a corpus of Wikipedia articles on science and technology

Abstract

Eduard Aibar is an associate professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Arts & Humanities Department, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). He has been the director of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute and vice-president for research at UOC. He leads a research group on open science and innovation. His research has focused on the interaction between scientific and technological development and organizational and social change in areas such as eGovernment, town planning, and the Internet. He is currently leading a research project on the relationship between science and peer production. AbstractDespite the huge amount of scientific and technological content available on the World Wide Web, most of it is closed behind paywalls, as with academic journals, or almost invisible, as with institutional repositories. Wikipedia can act as a chain-transfer agent, providing people with an accessible, organized structure containing both understandable content and links to original sources. In Wikipedia, categories are collaboratively created and thus become a folksonomy rather than a true taxonomy. Consequently, categories are not a reliable tool to identify topics' organization. In this paper we describe a semi-automatic method, based on random walks, for determining a subset of pages containing scientific and technological content in the Spanish Wikipedia. Using the Unesco taxonomy, we determined the underlying graph structure of our corpus and detected clusters of pages strongly linked, establishing relationships between knowledge domains. Finally, we present the distribution of Wikipedia articles according to the Unesco taxonomy and the resulting map of scientific and technological content. KeywordsWikipedia; Science and technology; Corpus; Infomap; Community detection; Unesco taxonomy. ResumenA pesar de la gran cantidad de contenido científico y tecnológico disponible en la World Wide Web, su mayoría se encuentra encerrado tras sistemas de pago, como las revistas académicas, o es casi invisible, como los repositorios institucionales. Wikipedia puede actuar como un agente de transferencia, proporcionando una estructura organizada y accesible conteniendo tanto contenidos como enlaces a las fuentes originales. En Wikipedia las categorías se han cread colaborativamente y por lo tanto son más una folksonomía que una verdadera taxonomía. Consecuentemente, las categorías no son una herramienta válida para identificar la organización de los contenidos. En este artículo se describe un método semi-automático, basado en paseos aleatorios, para determinar un subconjunto de páginas con contenido científico y tecnológico de la Wikipedia españo-la. Usando la taxonomía Unesco, se determina la estructura subyacente del grafo del corpus y se detectan grupos de páginas fuertemente enlazadas, estableciendo las relaciones entre las áreas de conocimiento. Finalmente, se presenta la distribución de artículos de Wikipedia de acuerdo con la taxonomía Unesco y el mapa resultante de contenido científico y tecnológico.

Exploring the gender gap in the Spanish Wikipedia: Differences in engagement and editing practices

“…We followed the procedure described by Lam et al [ 12 ] using a different set of categories to those used for the English Wikipedia, given the particularities of the categories in the Spanish Wikipedia. Several authors have stated that Wikipedia’s categories are more of a folksonomy than a true taxonomy [ 37 – 39 ], and cannot be completely relied upon to organize and navigate through its content. Furthermore, Wikipedia’s categories have tended to be more stable at the bottom (i.e., the category terms on Wikipedia pages do not change over time) than at the top level [ 40 ], making top-level categories less reliable because they are occasionally reorganized.…”

Wikipedia como medio de divulgación y comunicación científica: influencia en el campo educativo, investigativo y bibliotecológico-documental

“…Aun cuando existe gran cantidad de contenido científico y tecnológico disponible en la web, en su mayoría, sigue perteneciendo a sistemas cerrados de pago, como es el caso de las revistas científicas y repositorios. Wikipedia se convierte en un agente de transferencia, usando una estructura organizada y accesible a fuentes originales (Minguillón et al, 2017). b. Es un sistema de divulgación y comunicación de contenidos científicos, que propicia la inmediatez de conocimientos producidos, dado que son publicados en la red de inmediato.…”

ADD: Academic Disciplines Detector Based on Wikipedia

“…On the contrary to the common use of unsupervised machine learning methods, this work is based on supervised methods, incorporating the ''ground truth'' knowledge from an expert classification scheme into the training/test data. Most of the related work based on Wikipedia utilizes the article interlinks or the category graph in conjunction with network analyses to identify articles/categories referring to disciplines or scientific concepts [33], [34], [37]. Those that use machine learning algorithms to classify Wikipedia articles as ''appropriate'' or not in a specific context, train their models on a smaller number of manually engineered features and smaller datasets compared to the method presented in this work, which in its core module uses automatically extracted features of larger dimension and larger training/test datasets.…”

“…Then the Arts category and its related categories are mapped to UDC and compared for their structure. Minguillón et al[34] present a semi-automatic method based on random walks to determine a subset of Wikipedia articles containing scientific and technological content. 60,108 Spanish Wikipedia pages in 340 communities were identified as containing scientific and technological content, reachable from 974 six-digit categories from the UNESCO nomenclature for fields of science and technology.…”