Just a couple of thoughts that cross my mind ...
If people use the {{cite book}} etc templates, it will be relatively easy to
work out what the components of the citation are. However if people roll their
own, e.g.
<ref>[http://someurl This And That], Blah Blah 2000</ref>
you may have some difficulty working out what is what. I've just been though a
tedious exercise of updating a set of URLs using AWB over some thousands of
articles and some of the ways people roll their own citations were quite
remarkable (and often quite unhelpful). It may be that you can't extract much
from such citations. However, the good news is that if they have a URL in them,
it will probably be in plain-sight.
Whereas there are a number of templates that I regularly use for citation like
{{cite QHR}} (currently 1234 transclusions) and {{cite QPN}} (currently 2738
transclusions) and {{Census 2011 AUS}} (4400 transclusions) all of which
generate their URLs. I'm not sure how you will deal with these in terms of
extracting URLs.
But whatever the limitations, it will be a useful dataset to answer some
interesting questions.
One phenomena I often see is new users updating information (e.g. changing the
population of a town) while leaving behind the old citation for the previous
value. So it superficially looks like the new information is cited to a
reliable source when in fact it isn't. I've often wished we could automatically
detect and raise a "warning" when the "text being supported" by the citation
changes yet the citation does not. The problem, of course, is that we only know
where the citation appears in the text and that we presume it is in support for
"some earlier" text (without being clear exactly where it is). And if an
article is reorganised, it may well result in the citation "drifting away" from
the text it supports or even that it is in support of text that has been
deleted. So I think it is important to know what text preceded the citation at
the time the citation first appears in the article history as it may be useful
to compare it against the text that *now* appears before it. It is a great pity
that (in these digital times) we have not developed a citation model where you
select chunks of text and link your citation to them, so that the relationship
between the text and the citation is more apparent.
Kerry
-----Original Message-----
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Andrea Forte
Sent: Tuesday, 2 May 2017 5:18 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<[email protected]>
Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Citation Project - Comments Welcome!
Hi all,
One of my PhD students, Meen Chul Kim, is a data scientist with experience in
bibliometrics and we will be working on some citation-related research together
with Aaron and Dario in the coming months. Our main goal in the short term is
to develop an enhanced citation dataset that will allow for future analyses of
citation data associated with article quality, lifecycle, editing trends, etc.
The project page is here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Understanding_the_context_of_citations_in_Wikipedia
The project is just getting started so this is a great time to offer feedback
and suggestions, especially for features of citations that we should mine as a
first step, since this will affect what the dataset can be used for in the
future.
Looking forward to seeing some of you at WikiCite!!
Andrea
--
:: Andrea Forte
:: Associate Professor
:: College of Computing and Informatics, Drexel University
:: http://www.andreaforte.net
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