WikiRef: Wikilinks as a route to recommendingappropriate references for scientific Wikipedia pages
Table 1: Representative scientific Wikipedia articles with detailed statistic of their edit history. Start date indicates the date of creation of Wikipage and end date indicates the time point till which we perform the analysis of edit history.
['Wikipage title', 'Start date', 'End date', '#(Total edits)', '#(Wikilink edits)', '#(Ref. edits)']
In the following we enlist some initial observations to show that there is a huge scope of improvement of the scientific Wikipedia articles through the inclusion of a proper set of references. Also from the survey conducted by it has been observed that adding or editing the reference section is harder compared to adding or editing simple text or a wikilink which therefore leads to much less frequent changes of the reference section. In order to further confirm this trend, we conduct an analysis on the edit history of 1120 Wikipedia articles from the Computer Science category and observe that till Jan, 2017 on average around 65% edits are in the text content, 32% are wikilink edits and strikingly only 1% are reference edits. Rest correspond to table, template and category edits etc. We present some example Clearly, all these observations point to the requirement of an automated reference recommendation system to keep the reference section of a scientific Wikipedia article up-to-date.