Abstract
This chapter presents an empirical study about the temporal patterns characterizing the requests submitted by users to Wikipedia. The study is based on the analysis of the log lines registered by the Wikimedia Foundation Squid servers after having sent the appropriate content in response to users’ requests. The analysis has been conducted regarding the ten most visited editions of Wikipedia and has involved more than 14,000 million log lines corresponding to the traffic of the entire year 2009. The conducted methodology has mainly consisted in the parsing and filtering of users’ requests according to the study directives. As a result, relevant information fields have been finally stored in a database for persistence and further characterization. In this way, we, first, assessed, whether the traffic to Wikipedia could serve as a reliable estimator of the overall traffic to all the Wikimedia Foundation projects. Our subsequent analysis of the temporal evolutions corresponding to the different types of requests to Wikipedia revealed interesting differences and similarities among them that can be related to the users’ attention to the Encyclopedia. In addition, we have performed separated characterizations of each Wikipedia edition to compare their respective evolutions over time.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Buriol, L.S., Castillo, C., Donato, D., Leonardi, S., Millozzi, S.: Temporal analysis of the wikigraph. In: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, WI 2006, pp. 45–51. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2006)
Capocci, A., Servedio, V.D.P., Colaiori, F., Buriol, L.S., Donato, D., Leonardi, S., Caldarelli, G.: Preferential attachment in the growth of social networks: the case of wikipedia (February 2006)
Chesney, T.: An empirical examination of wikipedia’s credibility. First Monday 11(11) (November 2006)
Giles, J.: Internet encyclopaedias go head to head. Nature 438(7070), 900–901 (2005)
Kittur, A., Suh, B., Pendleton, B.A., Chi, E.H.: He says, she says: conflict and coordination in wikipedia. In: CHI 2007: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 453–462. ACM Press, New York (2007)
Korfiatis, Nikolaos, Poulos, Marios, Bokos, George: Evaluating authoritative sources using social networks: an insight from wikipedia. Online Information Review 30(3), 252–262 (2006)
Kuznetsov, S.: Motivations of contributors to wikipedia. SIGCAS Comput. Soc. 36(2) (June 2006)
Nielsen, F.A.: Scientific citations in wikipedia (May 2007)
Nov, O.: What motivates wikipedians? Commun. ACM 50(11), 60–64 (2007)
Ortega, F.: Wikipedia: A quantitative analysis. PhD thesis, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (2009), http://libresoft.es/Members/jfelipe/phd-thesis
Ortega, F., Gonzalez-Barahona, J.M., Robles, G.: The top ten wikipedias: A quantitative analysis using wikixray. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Software and Data Technologies (ICSOFT 2007). INSTICC. Springer (July 2007)
Priedhorsky, R., Chen, J., Lam, S.K., Panciera, K., Terveen, L., Riedl, J.: Creating, destroying, and restoring value in wikipedia. MISSING (November 2007)
Reinoso, A.J.: Temporal and behavioral patterns in the use of Wikipedia. PhD thesis, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (2011), http://gsyc.es/~ajreinoso/phdthesis
Spinellis, D., Louridas, P.: The collaborative organization of knowledge. Commun. ACM 51(8), 68–73 (2008)
Suh, B., Chi, E.H., Pendleton, B.A., Kittur, A.: Us vs. them: Understanding social dynamics in wikipedia with revert graph visualizations. In: 2007 IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology, pp. 163–170. IEEE (October 2007)
Suh, B., Convertino, G., Chi, E.H., Pirolli, P.: The singularity is not near: slowing growth of wikipedia. In: WikiSym 2009: Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, pp. 1–10. ACM, New York (2009)
Tony, S., Riedl, J.: Is wikipedia growing a longer tail? In: GROUP 2009: Proceedings of the ACM 2009 International Conference on Supporting Group Work, pp. 105–114. ACM, New York (2009)
Urdaneta, G., Pierre, G., van Steen, M.: A decentralized wiki enginge for collaborative wikipedia hosting. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, pp. 156–163 (March 2007)
Viégas, F.B., Wattenberg, M., Kriss, J., van Ham, F.: Talk before you type: Coordination in wikipedia. In: MISSING, p. 78 (2007)
Voss, J.: Measuring wikipedia. In: 10th International Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics, ISSI (July 2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Reinoso, A.J., Gonzalez-Barahona, J.M., Muñoz-Mansilla, R., Herraiz, I. (2013). Temporal Characterization of the Requests to Wikipedia. In: Lai, C., Semeraro, G., Vargiu, E. (eds) New Challenges in Distributed Information Filtering and Retrieval. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 439. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31546-6_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31546-6_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-31545-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-31546-6
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)