What is Trending on Wikipedia? Capturing Trends and Language Biases Across Wikipedia Editions

In this work, we propose an automatic evaluation and comparison of the browsing behavior of Wikipedia readers that can be applied to any language editions of Wikipedia. As an example, we focus on English, French, and Russian languages during the last four months of 2018. The proposed method has thre...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inarXiv.org
Main Authors Miz, Volodymyr, Hanna, Joëlle, Aspert, Nicolas, Ricaud, Benjamin, Vandergheynst, Pierre
Format Paper Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Ithaca Cornell University Library, arXiv.org 17.02.2020
Subjects
Browsing
Computer Science - Computers and Society
Computer Science - Social and Information Networks
Encyclopedias
Languages
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Summary:In this work, we propose an automatic evaluation and comparison of the browsing behavior of Wikipedia readers that can be applied to any language editions of Wikipedia. As an example, we focus on English, French, and Russian languages during the last four months of 2018. The proposed method has three steps. Firstly, it extracts the most trending articles over a chosen period of time. Secondly, it performs a semi-supervised topic extraction and thirdly, it compares topics across languages. The automated processing works with the data that combines Wikipedia's graph of hyperlinks, pageview statistics and summaries of the pages. The results show that people share a common interest and curiosity for entertainment, e.g. movies, music, sports independently of their language. Differences appear in topics related to local events or about cultural particularities. Interactive visualizations showing clusters of trending pages in each language edition are available online https://wiki-insights.epfl.ch/wikitrends
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.2002.06885