2019:Research/Characterizing Wikipedia Citation Usage
 | This is an Accepted submission for the Research space at Wikimania 2019. |
Abstract
editCitations have a key role in Wikipedia. They act as a bridge between the individual Wikipedia articles and a broader ecosystem of interdisciplinary knowledge. Citations allow readers to find in-depth information about the topics they are interested in, and also to verify the reliability of the knowledge they find in Wikipedia.
But are Wikipedia readers actually interested in citations? Do readers click on external references when reading Wikipedia articles? We recently started a research project to answer these questions, and characterize Wikipedia readers' interactions with citations.
To gain a systematic understanding of this space, we instrumented English Wikipedia for a limited amount of time, and captured user interactions (click, hover) with the footnotes and references in each article, collecting hundreds of million of events. We then analyzed this data to quantify readers' interest in citations, namely how likely users are to click or hover on an external link, and relate it to different dimensions, including page topic and popularity, reference topic, and user location.
This talk will report the initial set of results from the analysis of this data, and propose a set of future directions for this research project.
Authors
editTiziano Piccardi (EPFL), Bob West (EPFL), Giovanni Colavizza (University of Amsterdam), Dario Taraborelli (CZI), Michele Catasta (Stanford University), Miriam Redi (WMF)
Session type
edit22-min presentation.
Participants [subscribe here!]
edit# ...