Completeness and Reliability of Wikipedia Infoboxes in Various Languages

Abstract

Despite its popularity, Wikipedia is often criticized for poor information quality. Currently this online knowledge base consist over 45 million articles in almost 300 various languages. Articles in Wikipedia often includes special tables which present shortly important information about persons, places, products, organizations and other subjects. This table is usually placed in a visible part of the article and Wikipedia community called it “infobox”. These infoboxes contains information in a structured form that allows automatically enrich popular public databases such as DBpedia. Wikipedia users can edit infoboxes in different languages independently. So, quality of information about the same thing may differ between various language versions. This article will examine the completeness and reliability of infoboxes about different topics in seven language versions of Wikipedia: English, German, French, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian. The results of the study can be used for automatic assessing and improving the quality of information in Wikipedia as well as in other public knowledge bases.