Abstract
Wikipedia supports its users to reach a wide variety of goals: looking up facts, researching a topic, making an edit or simply browsing to pass time. Some of these goals, such as the lookup of facts, can be effectively supported by search functions. However, for other use cases such as researching an unfamiliar topic, users need to rely on the links to connect articles. In this paper, we investigate the state of navigability in the article networks of eight language versions of Wikipedia. We find that, when taking all links of articles into account, all language versions enable mutual reachability for almost all articles. However, previous research has shown that visitors of Wikipedia focus most of their attention on the areas located close to the top. We therefore investigate different restricted navigational views that users could have when looking at articles. We find that restricting the view of articles strongly limits the navigability of the resulting networks and impedes navigation. Based on this analysis we then propose a link recommendation method to augment the link network to improve navigability in the network. Our approach selects links from a less restricted view of the article and proposes to move these links into more visible sections. The recommended links are therefore relevant for the article. Our results are relevant for researchers interested in the navigability of Wikipedia and open up new avenues for link recommendations in Wikipedia editing.
Highlights
The multiple language editions of Wikipedia serve around 16 billion views per month as of 2016, with the English Wikipedia accounting for almost half of them 1
What is the state of navigability across multiple language versions of Wikipedia? RQ2
In this article we have assessed the navigability of eight large Wikipedia language versions and suggested a method to recommend links
Summary
The multiple language editions of Wikipedia serve around 16 billion views per month as of 2016, with the English Wikipedia accounting for almost half of them 1. For the English Wikipedia, out of 3, 279, 134, 602 visits to articles collected in a clickstream in February 2015 [43], 30% were referred to from other Wikipedia articles, and 70% from external sources This suggests that external links to Wikipedia, such as search engines, play an important role in referring visitors to the encyclopedia. Based on the results of this analysis, we propose a method to improve navigability in Wikipedia by recommending specific links from articles to move into the more visible regions of an article or otherwise emphasize. We show that for a restricted views of articles, only a relatively small share of the articles in Wikipedia is reachable by following links Based on this analysis, we propose a method to improve reachability in the article networks by suggesting specific links that could be emphasized, such as being moved to sections that users pay more attention to
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