Wikimedia Research/Showcase/Archive/2021/05

May 2021

Theme: The value and importance of Wikipedia

May 19, 2021 Video: YouTube

The Importance of Wikipedia to Search Engines and Other Systems

By Nick Vincent (Northwestern University)

A growing body of work has highlighted the important role that Wikipedia’s volunteer-created content plays in helping search engines achieve their core goal of addressing the information needs of hundreds of millions of people. In this talk, I will discuss a recent study looking at how often, and where, Wikipedia links appear in search engine results. In this study, we found that Wikipedia links appeared prominently and frequently in Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo results, though less often for searches from a mobile device. I will connect this study to past work looking at the value of Wikipedia links to other online platforms, and to ongoing discussions around Wikipedia's value as a training source for modern AI.

* Related paper: A Deeper Investigation of the Importance of Wikipedia Links to Search Engine Results. To Appear in CSCW 2021. (Link to pdf)

* Slides on figshare

On the Value of Wikipedia as a Gateway to the Web

By Tiziano Piccardi (EPFL)

By linking to external websites, Wikipedia can act as a gateway to the Web. However, little is known about the amount of traffic generated by Wikipedia's external links. We fill this gap in a detailed analysis of usage logs gathered from Wikipedia users' client devices. We discovered that in one month, English Wikipedia generated 43M clicks to external websites, with the highest click-through rate on the official links listed in the infoboxes. Our analysis highlights that the articles about businesses, educational institutions, and websites show the highest engagement, and for some content, Wikipedia act as a stepping stone to the intended destination. We conclude our analysis by quantifying the hypothetical economic value of the clicks received by external websites. We estimate that the respective website owners would need to pay a total of $7--13 million per month to obtain the same volume of traffic via sponsored search. These findings shed light on Wikipedia's role not only as an important source of information but also as a high-traffic gateway to the broader Web ecosystem.