The Substantial Interdependence of Wikipedia and Google: A Case Study on the Relationship Between Peer Production Communities and Information Technologies

Abstract

While Wikipedia is a subject of great interest in the computing literature, very little work has considered Wikipedia’s important relationships with other information technologies like search engines. In this paper, we report the results of two deception studies whose goal was to better understand the critical relationship between Wikipedia and Google. These studies silently removed Wikipedia content from Google search results and examined the effect of doing so on participants’ interactions with both websites. Our findings demonstrate and characterize an extensive interdependence between Wikipedia and Google. Google becomes a worse search engine for many queries when it cannot surface Wikipedia content (for example, click-through rates on results pages drop significantly) and the importance of Wikipedia content is likely greater than many improvements to search algorithms. Our results also highlight Google’s critical role in providing readership to Wikipedia. However, we also found evidence that this mutually beneficial relationship is in jeopardy: changes Google has made to its search results that involve directly surfacing Wikipedia content are significantly reducing traffic to Wikipedia. Overall, our findings argue that researchers and practitioners should give deeper consideration to the interdependence between peer production communities and the information technologies that use and surface their content.

Measuring the Importance of User-Generated Content to Search Engines

“…However, very recent work has suggested that search engines, despite their power and profitability, may be surprisingly dependent on a resource that is both volunteercreated and freely available: user-generated content (UGC), and specifically Wikipedia. In particular, McMahon et al (2017) found that search engine result page (SERP) click-through rates dropped drastically from 26% to 14% when Wikipedia results were removed from SERPs. This drop in click-through ratea critical search engine evaluation metricis enough to easily wipe out gains made by even major improvements to search engine algorithms, for instance the introduction of deep learning (Clark 2015).…”

Improving Wikidata with Student-Generated Concept Maps

“…In 2014, Google committed to transferring all content from Freebase, a Google-owned knowledge graph, to Wikidata (Pellissier Tanon et al 2016), indicating their intention to continue relying on Wikidata to help populate Google Search results. However, Google does little to support Wikidata other than exploit the knowledge it contains, and may even reduce traffic to Wikidata by displaying knowledge in its own search panels without crediting Wikidata (McMahon, Johnson, and Hecht 2017).…”

Participation of New Editors after Times of Shock on Wikipedia

“…This further validates our shock identification procedure. Indeed, Wikipedia and search engines (such as Google) play an important role in each other's traffic and quality (McMahon, Johnson, and Hecht 2017).…”