Identification of Important Web Sources of Information on Wikipedia across various Topics and Languages

Abstract

Despite the fact, that over 21 years Wikipedia is edited by volunteers from all over the world with different views, culture, education and competences, this free encyclopedia is one of the most popular source of knowledge in the Internet. Freedom to edit does not mean, that you can put there whatever content you want. One of the core rules of Wikipedia says, that information in its articles should be based on reliable sources and Wikipedia readers must be able to verify particular facts in text. However, reliability is a subjective concept and a reputation of the same source can be assessed diffidently depending on a person (or group of persons), language and topic. So each language version of Wikipedia may have own rules or criteria on how the website must be assessed before it can be used as a source in references. At the same time, nowadays there are over 1 billion websites on the Internet and only few developed language chapters of the encyclopedia contains non-exhaustive lists of less than 1 thousand popular websites with reliability assessment. Additionally, since reputation of the source can be changed during the time, such lists must be updated regularly.This study presents result of important web sources identification based on analysis of over 230 million references that were extracted from over 40 million Wikipedia article of 42 most developed language version. Additionally, general statistics on references usage for each considered Wikipedia language were counted, including average number of references, number of unique references, scientific score, number of websites in references. Next, Wikipedia articles were assigned to different topics in each considered language. This allows to find differences in reliability and popularity of the same sources of information between Wikipedia languages, as well as find important websites in specific areas of knowledge.