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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 1250068 |
| Journal | Advances in Complex Systems |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue number | SUPPL. 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jun 2012 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work has been performed in Knowledge Space Lab project, a Strategiefonds project of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). The data processing has been performed in collaboration with BigGrid-NL, based on a grant of NWO (project “Emergence of category systems in knowledge spaces — the WIKI case”). We would like to thank in particular Tom Visser, Coen Schrijvers and Ammar Benabadelkader from the BigGrid team for their support. This research has been also supported by the COST action network MP0801 “Physics of competition and conflicts”.
Funding
This work has been performed in Knowledge Space Lab project, a Strategiefonds project of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). The data processing has been performed in collaboration with BigGrid-NL, based on a grant of NWO (project “Emergence of category systems in knowledge spaces — the WIKI case”). We would like to thank in particular Tom Visser, Coen Schrijvers and Ammar Benabadelkader from the BigGrid team for their support. This research has been also supported by the COST action network MP0801 “Physics of competition and conflicts”.
Keywords
- Classification systems
- evolution
- knowledge organization
- Wikipedia