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

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Quantitative science studies 2022-04, Vol.3 (1), p.147-173
Main Authors: Zagorova, Olga, Ulloa, Roberto, Weller, Katrin, Flöck, Fabian
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
altmetrics
Bibliometrics
data quality
Datasets
edit histories
Encyclopedias
Evolution
Informetrics
Wikipedia editors
Wikipedia references
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2641-3337
2641-3337
DOI:10.1162/qss_a_00171