Wikimedia Research Showcase - November 2019
Channel: Wikimedia Foundation
Date: 2019-11-20

Wikipedia Text Reuse: Within and Without
By Martin Potthast, Leipzig University
We study text reuse related to Wikipedia at scale by compiling the first corpus of text reuse cases within Wikipedia as well as without (i.e., reuse of Wikipedia text in a sample of the Common Crawl). To discover reuse beyond verbatim copy and paste, we employ state-of-the-art text reuse detection technology, scaling it for the first time to process the entire Wikipedia as part of a distributed retrieval pipeline. We further report on a pilot analysis of the 100 million reuse cases inside, and the 1.6 million reuse cases outside Wikipedia that we discovered. Text reuse inside Wikipedia gives rise to new tasks such as article template induction, fixing quality flaws, or complementing Wikipedia’s ontology. Text reuse outside Wikipedia yields a tangible metric for the emerging field of quantifying Wikipedia’s influence on the web. To foster future research into these tasks, and for reproducibility’s sake, the Wikipedia text reuse corpus and the retrieval pipeline are made freely available. Paper Demo

Characterizing Wikipedia Reader Demographics and Interests
By Isaac Johnson, Wikimedia Foundation
Building on two past surveys on the motivation and needs of Wikipedia readers (Why We Read Wikipedia; Why the World Reads Wikipedia), we examine the relationship between Wikipedia reader demographics and their interests and needs. Specifically, we run surveys in thirteen different languages that ask readers three questions about their motivation for reading Wikipedia (motivation, needs, and familiarity) and five questions about their demographics (age, gender, education, locale, and native language). We link these survey results with the respondents' reading sessions -- i.e. sequence of Wikipedia page views -- to gain a more fine-grained understanding of how a reader's context relates to their activity on Wikipedia. We find that readers have a diversity of backgrounds but that the high-level needs of readers do not correlate strongly with individual demographics. We also find, however, that there are relationships between demographics and specific topic interests that are consistent across many cultures and languages. This work provides insights into the reach of various Wikipedia language editions and the relationship between content or contributor gaps and reader gaps. See the meta page for more details.