EVOLUTION OF WIKIPEDIA'S CATEGORY STRUCTURE

Krzysztof Suchecki (), Alkim Almila Akdag Salah (), Cheng Gao and Andrea Scharnhorst ()
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Krzysztof Suchecki: The e-Humanities Group, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), Joan Muyskenweg 25, 1096 CJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands;
Alkim Almila Akdag Salah: UvA, New Media Department, Amsterdam, The Netherlands;
Cheng Gao: Room 422, No. 10 Building, Wencui Rd., Ganjingzi district, Dalian, China
Andrea Scharnhorst: Data Archiving and Networked Services, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), The Hague, The Netherlands;

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 2012, vol. 15, issue supp0, 1-21

Abstract: Wikipedia, as a social phenomenon of collaborative knowledge creation, has been studied extensively from various points of view. The category system of Wikipedia, introduced in 2004, has attracted relatively little attention. In this study, we focus on the documentation of knowledge, and the transformation of this documentation with time. We take Wikipedia as a sample of knowledge in general and its category system as an aspect of the structure of this knowledge. We investigate the evolution of the category structure of the English Wikipedia from its birth in 2004 to 2008. We treat the category system as if it is a hierarchical Knowledge Organization System, capturing the changes in the distributions of the top categories. We investigate how the clustering of articles, defined by the category system, matches the direct link network between the articles and show how it changes over time. We find the Wikipedia category network mostly stable, but with occasional reorganization. We show that the clustering matches the link structure quite well, except short periods preceding the reorganizations.

Keywords: Classification systems; Wikipedia; evolution; knowledge organization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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DOI: 10.1142/S0219525912500683

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