Wikipedia's coverage and conflicts quantified
Researchers at PARC, creators of WikiDashboard (see previous coverage) have announced a new study of English Wikipedia that quantifies Wikipedia coverage. Based on the categories assigned to each article, coverage is sorted according to eleven broad categories used in Wikipedia's Categorical index: Culture and the arts; Geography and places; Health and fitness; History and events; Mathematics and logic; Natural and physical sciences; People and self; Philosophy and thinking; Religion and belief systems; Society and social sciences; and Technology and applied sciences. ("General reference" is excluded.) They report the following approximate breakdown in coverage:
- Culture and the arts: 30%
- People and self: 15%
- Geography and places: 14%
- Society and social sciences: 12%
- History and events: 11%
- Natural and physical sciences: 9%
- Technology and applied sciences: 4%
- Religion and belief systems: 2%
- Health and fitness: 2%
- Mathematics and logic: 1%
- Philosophy and thinking: 1%
The PARC researchers presented a short paper describing their work, "What’s in Wikipedia? Mapping Topics and Conflict Using Socially Annotated Category Structure" to the 'CHI2009 conference on Human-Computer Interaction', and have a blog post summary of the results.