Wikipedia as a data source for studies of collective mental representations of geographical objects (examplified by the cities of the Russian Arctic zone)

Abstract

Articles of Wikipedia crowdsourcing encyclopedia, which is one of the most popular Internet resources in Russia and in the world, are considered as a source of data for research of mass representations about geographical objects. The article analyzes statistical data on the number of views of Wikipedia pages on the urban settlements of the Arctic zone of Russia, as well as quantitative characteristics such as the length of the article (number of characters) and the frequency of updates. These indicators for 57 articles on the largest settlements of the Russian Arctic are collected in the database, and on their basis, we have made calculations of integrated indices (separately for small towns from 4 to 25 thousand inhabitants and for larger ones), which characterize the level of provision of information about the studied settlements for readers of Wikipedia. The lower the value of the calculated indicator, the more «faceless» the urban settlement is in collective representations, and the more attention should be paid to its image policy.