Modeling Popularity and Reliability of Sources in Multilingual Wikipedia

By Włodzimierz Lewoniewski, Krzysztof Węcel, W. Abramowicz. 2020

22 citations recorded by the source corpus.

One of the most important factors impacting quality of content in Wikipedia is presence of reliable sources. By following references, readers can verify facts or find more details about described topic. A Wikipedia article can be edited independently in any of over 300 languages, even by anonymous users, therefore information about the same topic may be inconsistent. This also applies to use of references in different language versions of a particular article, so the same statement can have different sources. In this paper we analyzed over 40 million articles from the 55 most developed language versions of Wikipedia to extract information about over 200 million references and find the most popular and reliable sources. We presented 10 models for the assessment of the popularity and reliability of the sources based on analysis of meta information about the references in Wikipedia articles, page views and authors of the articles. Using DBpedia and Wikidata we automatically identified the alignment of the sources to a specific domain. Additionally, we analyzed the changes of popularity and reliability in time and identified growth leaders in each of the considered months. The results can be used for quality improvements of the content in different languages versions of Wikipedia.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Communication, Molecular Biology, Natural Language Processing

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Citations in the corpus

Improving Wikipedia verifiability with AI (2022, background): “Several studies have also been conducted on user interactions with citations (Piccardi et al., 2020; Lewoniewski et al., 2020; Piccardi et al., 2021; Kaﬀee & Elsahar, 2021; Zagorova et al., 2022) that are tangential to our work.”
References in Wikipedia: The Editors’ Perspective (2021, background): “[5] propose models to assess popularity and reliability of references in Wikipedia.”
“I updated the ”: The evolution of references in the English Wikipedia and the implications for altmetrics (2020, background): “” With the self-control mechanisms and guidelines applied within this community, Wikipedia references are expected to meet basic quality standards (Lewoniewski, W ę cel, & Abramowicz, 2020).”