“I updated the ”: The evolution of references in the English Wikipedia and the implications for altmetrics

By Olga Zagovora, Roberto Ulloa, Katrin Weller, Fabian Flöck. 2020

17 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract With this work, we present a publicly available data set of the history of all the references (more than 55 million) ever used in the English Wikipedia until June 2019. We have applied a new method for identifying and monitoring references in Wikipedia, so that for each reference we can provide data about associated actions: creation, modifications, deletions, and reinsertions. The high accuracy of this method and the resulting data set was confirmed via a comprehensive crowdworker labeling campaign. We use the data set to study the temporal evolution of Wikipedia references as well as users’ editing behavior. We find evidence of a mostly productive and continuous effort to improve the quality of references: There is a persistent increase of reference and document identifiers (DOI, PubMedID, PMC, ISBN, ISSN, ArXiv ID) and most of the reference curation work is done by registered humans (not bots or anonymous editors). We conclude that the evolution of Wikipedia references, including the dynamics of the community processes that tend to them, should be leveraged in the design of relevance indexes for altmetrics, and our data set can be pivotal for such an effort.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Communication, Social Sciences & Humanities

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

  1. Sebastian Riedel
  2. Hinrich Schütze
  3. Luke S. Zettlemoyer
  4. Patrick Lewis
  5. Timo Schick
  6. Fabio Petroni
  7. Hannaneh Hajishirzi
  8. Edouard Grave

In Communication

  1. Patrick Lewis
  2. Armand Joulin
  3. Edouard Grave
  4. Fabio Petroni
  5. Pierre-Emmanuel Mazaré
  6. Sebastian Riedel

Citations in the corpus