IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jamist/v62y2011i1p117-132.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Ranking of Wikipedia articles in search engines revisited: Fair ranking for reasonable quality?

Author

Listed:
  • Dirk Lewandowski
  • Ulrike Spree

Abstract

This paper aims to review the fiercely discussed question of whether the ranking of Wikipedia articles in search engines is justified by the quality of the articles. After an overview of current research on information quality in Wikipedia, a summary of the extended discussion on the quality of encyclopedic entries in general is given. On this basis, a heuristic method for evaluating Wikipedia entries is developed and applied to Wikipedia articles that scored highly in a search engine retrieval effectiveness test and compared with the relevance judgment of jurors. In all search engines tested, Wikipedia results are unanimously judged better by the jurors than other results on the corresponding results position. Relevance judgments often roughly correspond with the results from the heuristic evaluation. Cases in which high relevance judgments are not in accordance with the comparatively low score from the heuristic evaluation are interpreted as an indicator of a high degree of trust in Wikipedia. One of the systemic shortcomings of Wikipedia lies in its necessarily incoherent user model. A further tuning of the suggested criteria catalog, for instance, the different weighing of the supplied criteria, could serve as a starting point for a user model differentiated evaluation of Wikipedia articles. Approved methods of quality evaluation of reference works are applied to Wikipedia articles and integrated with the question of search engine evaluation.

Suggested Citation

  • Dirk Lewandowski & Ulrike Spree, 2011. "Ranking of Wikipedia articles in search engines revisited: Fair ranking for reasonable quality?," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 62(1), pages 117-132, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:62:y:2011:i:1:p:117-132
    DOI: 10.1002/asi.21423
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21423
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/asi.21423?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Nicolas Jullien, 2012. "What We Know About Wikipedia: A Review of the Literature Analyzing the Project(s)," Post-Print hal-00857208, HAL.
    2. Dirk Lewandowski, 2015. "Evaluating the retrieval effectiveness of web search engines using a representative query sample," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 66(9), pages 1763-1775, September.
    3. Grace Gimon Betancourt & Armando Segnini & Carlos Trabuco & Amira Rezgui & Nicolas Jullien, 2016. "Mining team characteristics to predict Wikipedia article quality," Post-Print hal-01354368, HAL.
    4. Kevin Crowston & Nicolas Jullien & Felipe Ortega, 2013. "Is Wikipedia Inefficient? Modelling Effort and Participation in Wikipedia," Post-Print hal-00947731, HAL.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:62:y:2011:i:1:p:117-132. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.asis.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.