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conference paper

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia

Piccardi, Tiziano  
•
Redi, Miriam
•
Colavizza, Giovanni
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January 1, 2020
Web Conference 2020: Proceedings Of The World Wide Web Conference (Www 2020)
29th Web Conference (WWW)

Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites on the Web and a common source of information for many users. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia was not conceived as a source of original information, but as a gateway to secondary sources: according to Wikipedia's guidelines, facts must be backed up by reliable sources that reflect the full spectrum of views on the topic. Although citations lie at the heart of Wikipedia, little is known about how users interact with them. To close this gap, we built client-side instrumentation for logging all interactions with links leading from English Wikipedia articles to cited references during one month, and conducted the first analysis of readers' interactions with citations. We find that overall engagement with citations is low: about one in 300 page views results in a reference click (0.29% overall; 0.56% on desktop; 0.13% on mobile). Matched observational studies of the factors associated with reference clicking reveal that clicks occur more frequently on shorter pages and on pages of lower quality, suggesting that references are consulted more commonly when Wikipedia itself does not contain the information sought by the user. Moreover, we observe that recent content, open access sources, and references about life events (births, deaths, marriages, etc.) are particularly popular. Taken together, our findings deepen our understanding of Wikipedia's role in a global information economy where reliability is ever less certain, and source attribution ever more vital.

  • Details
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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1145/3366423.3380300
Web of Science ID

WOS:000626273302040

Author(s)
Piccardi, Tiziano  
Redi, Miriam
Colavizza, Giovanni
West, Robert  
Date Issued

2020-01-01

Publisher

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY

Publisher place

New York

Published in
Web Conference 2020: Proceedings Of The World Wide Web Conference (Www 2020)
ISBN of the book

978-1-4503-7023-3

Start page

2365

End page

2376

Subjects

articles

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
DLAB  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
29th Web Conference (WWW)

Taipei, TAIWAN

Apr 20-24, 2020

Available on Infoscience
April 10, 2021
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/177143
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