High Impact: Wikipedia sources and edit history document two decades of the climate change field

Abstract

Since being founded in 2001, Wikipedia has grown into a trusted source of knowledge online, feeding Google search results and serving as training data for ChatGPT. Understanding the accuracy of its information, the sources behind its articles and their role in the transference of knowledge to the public are becoming increasingly important questions. Meanwhile, climate change has moved to the forefront of scientific and public discourse after years of warnings from the scientific community. Therefore, to understand how it was represented on English Wikipedia, we deployed a mixed-method approach on the article for “Effects of climate change” (ECC), its edit history and references, as well as hundreds of associated articles dealing with climate change in different ways. Using automated tools to scrape data from Wikipedia, we saw new articles were created as climatology-related knowledge grew and permeated into other fields, reflecting a growing body of climate research and growing public interest. Our qualitative textual analysis shows how specific descriptions of climatic phenomena became less hypothetical, reflecting the real-world public debate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had a big impact on content and structure, we found using a bibliometric analysis, and what made this possible, we also discovered through a historical analysis, was the impactful work of just a few editors. This research suggests Wikipedia’s articles documented the real-world events around climate change and its wider acceptance - initially a hypothesis that soon became a regretful reality. Overall, our findings highlight the unique role IPCC reports play in making scientific knowledge about climate change actionable to the public, and underscore Wikipedia’s ability to facilitate access to research. This work demonstrates Wikipedia can be researched using both computational and qualitative methods to better understand transference of scientific information to the public and the history of contemporary science.