Analysing the Usage of Wikipedia on Twitter: Understanding Inter-Language Links

Eva Zangerle, Georg Schmidhammer, Gunther Specht
2016 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)  
Wikipedia is a central source of information as 450 million people consult the online encyclopaedia every month to satisfy their information needs. Some of these users also refer to Wikipedia within their tweets. In this paper, we analyse links within tweets referring to a Wikipedia of a language different from the tweet's language. Therefore, we investigate causes for the usage of such inter-language links by comparing the tweeted article and its counterpart in the tweet's language (if there
more » ... any) in terms of article quality. We find that the main cause for inter-language links is the non-existence of the article in the tweet's language. Furthermore, we observe that the quality of the tweeted articles is constantly higher in comparison to their counterparts, suggesting that users choose the article of higher quality even when tweeting in another language. Moreover, we find that English is the most dominant target for inter-language links.
doi:10.1109/hicss.2016.243 dblp:conf/hicss/ZangerleSS16 fatcat:p27g25sxtrbxxoqtpc62zin3di