We have just published an article in Quantitative Science Studies (QSS) in which we carried out a double work with Wikipedia. This work is entitled Wikinformetrics: Construction and description of an open Wikipedia knowledge graph dataset for informetric purposes.
On the one hand, after reviewing the characteristics of Wikipedia, we offer a conceptual framework to better understand its functioning, making a comparison between its properties and those of a scientific work. On the other hand, we build a complete dataset using the English Wikipedia, including several metrics of each page, other entities, such as referenced resources or categories, and the relationships between all of them. Additionally, we explored this dataset to illustrate about its possibilities, offering several visualizations in an interactive way through the Shiny app.
Here you have the summary:
“Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in the world and is also a frequent subject of scientific research. However, the analytical possibilities of Wikipedia information have not yet been analyzed considering at the same time both a large volume of pages and attributes. The main objective of this work is to offer a methodological framework and an open knowledge graph for the informetric large-scale study of Wikipedia. Features of Wikipedia pages are compared with those of scientific publications to highlight the (di)similarities between the two types of documents. Based on this comparison, different analytical possibilities that Wikipedia and its various data sources offer are explored, ultimately offering a set of metrics meant to study Wikipedia from different analytical dimensions. In parallel, a complete dedicated dataset of the English Wikipedia was built (and shared) following a relational model. Finally, a descriptive case study is carried out on the English Wikipedia dataset to illustrate the analytical potential of the knowledge graph and its metrics.”
Arroyo-Machado, W., Torres-Salinas, D., & Costas, R. (2022). Wikinformetrics: Construction and description of an open Wikipedia knowledge graph dataset for informetric purposes. Quantitative Science Studies, 1-35. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00226