The People’s Encyclopedia Under the Gaze of the Sages: A Systematic Review of Scholarly Research on Wikipedia

Abstract

Wikipedia has become one of the ten most visited sites on the Web, and the world's leading source of Web reference information. Its rapid success has inspired hundreds of scholars from various disciplines to study its content, communication and community dynamics from various perspectives. This article presents a systematic review of scholarly research on Wikipedia. We describe our detailed, rigorous methodology for identifying over 450 scholarly studies of Wikipedia. We present the WikiLit website (http://wikilit.referata.com), where most of the papers reviewed here are described in detail. In the major section of this article, we then categorize and summarize the studies. An appendix features an extensive list of resources useful for Wikipedia researchers.

Reader preferences and behavior on Wikipedia

“…Thus, Wikipedia's production side has been the focus of numerous studies. A literature review by Okoli et al [15] covering 477 research studies on Wikipedia showed that 42% of the studies mostly centered on issues related to participation, i.e. how editors create and edit articles, resolve disputes, or organize their community.…”

“…Only 20% of the studies related to readers in Wikipedia, the usage side of Wikipedia, such as examining the popularity of articles or topics in Wikipedia. Less than 1% of the reviewed studies looked at users' reading preferences and only one study investigated reading behavior [15].…”

Scholia, Scientometrics and Wikidata

“…Other formatting in titles cannot directly be handled in Wikidata's title property, 25 and recording a date such as "Summer 2011" is difficult.…”

Wikipedia in the eyes of its beholders: A systematic review of scholarly research on Wikipedia readers and readership

“…This review of Wikipedia readership is part of a much larger review of scholarly research on all topics related to Wikipedia. In an overview paper of the entire project, we described our systematic review methodology in detail (Okoli et al., ), in which we identified more than 500 scholarly studies on Wikipedia published in English. In brief, we mainly focused on identifying peer‐reviewed journal publications and doctoral theses and tried to be as exhaustive as possible in identifying these.…”

“…Although all Wikipedia contributors are of course also readers, we restrict our focus here to topics that concern reading Wikipedia without substantial treatment of contribution. We cover issues related to Wikipedia contributors and participation in depth in a separate review (Okoli et al., ).…”