Mining the History Sections of Wikipedia Articles on Science and Technology

Kircheis, Wolfgang; Schmidt, Marion; Simons, Arno; Stein, Benno; Potthast, Martin

doi:10.1109/jcdl57899.2023.00037

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 12 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The IPCC had a big impact on Wikipedia and its history, we found, and what made this possible was the work of a small number of dedicated editors. In recent years, Wikipedia has been increasingly established as a historiographical source (3,8,15,37). Previous work regarding the Wiki-article for "Global warming" between 2002-2014 concluded that the IPCC report was prominently used (17).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They were however indicative of wider changes taking place in the table of content. Sections and their growth have previously been used by us (9) and others to map the growth of knowledge (37) on other scientific articles on Wikipedia. Alongside textual changes reflected in the article's text and size, we also observed changes in its TOC, which expanded and contracted over time (Fig 2C and Table S4).…”

Section: Structural Changesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

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

Benjakob,

Jouveshomme,

Collet

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Structural Changesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Benjakob,

Jouveshomme,

Collet

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Who are the “Heroes of CRISPR”? Public science communication on Wikipedia and the challenge of micro-notability

Simons,

Kircheis,

Schmidt

et al. 2024

Public Underst Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Wikipedia’s influence in shaping public perceptions of science underscores the significance of scientists being recognized on the platform, as it can impact their careers. Although Wikipedia offers guidelines for determining when a scientist qualifies for their own article, it currently lacks guidance regarding whether a scientist should be acknowledged in articles related to the innovation processes to which they have contributed. To explore how Wikipedia addresses this issue of scientific “micro-notability,” we introduce a digital method called Name Edit Analysis, enabling us to quantitatively and qualitatively trace mentions of scientists within Wikipedia’s articles. We study two CRISPR-related Wikipedia articles and find dynamic negotiations of micro-notability as well as a surprising tension between Wikipedia’s principle of safeguarding against self-promotion and the scholarly norm of “due credit.” To reconcile this tension, we propose that Wikipedians and scientists collaborate to establish specific micro-notability guidelines that acknowledge scientific contributions while preventing excessive self-promotion.

show abstract

Mining the History Sections of Wikipedia Articles on Science and Technology

Cited by 2 publications

References 12 publications

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

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

Who are the “Heroes of CRISPR”? Public science communication on Wikipedia and the challenge of micro-notability

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About