On April 18-19, the First Poznań Conference “Bibliometric analyses of Open Science” was held. During this event, Dr. Włodzimierz Lewoniewski presented results of the research on scientific publications and other important sources of information in Wikipedia articles in different languages.
Wikipedia is often criticized for its poor quality of information. Nevertheless, this public encyclopedia has been one of the most popular sources of information on the Internet for over 20 years. Currently, Wikipedia has over 60 million articles in over 300 languages. Information in this encyclopedia should be based on verifiable sources. However, not every website can act as a source of information. Wikipedia’s policy states that the information in the articles of this encyclopedia should be based on reliable and published content with a good reputation. However, reliability is a subjective concept, and the reputation of the same source can be judged by different criteria depending on the person (or group of people). Thus, each language version of Wikipedia may have its own rules or criteria for how a site must be evaluated before it can be used as a source in the references of a Wikipedia article. Therefore, the reliability of the same source on Wikipedia depends on the topic and the language version. In addition, the credibility rating of the same source may change over time.
As part of the presentation, models of automatic identification of important sources of information on specific topics in the multilingual Wikipedia were presented, based on the analysis of over 300 million references. These models take into account various measures of the quality and popularity of Wikipedia articles. To conduct research, Wikipedia articles have been divided into 70 topics of varying levels of abstraction covering areas such as culture, geography, history, society, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Additionally, as part of the research, scientific sources of information were identified, which allowed to determine the differences between the language versions.
The organizers of the conference were the University Library in Poznań and the Laboratory of Scientific Communication of the Adam Mickiewicz University. The event brought together scientists, doctoral students, librarians and employees of research and project departments, who had the opportunity to exchange experiences and views on the openness of science and the use of bibliometric indicators in scientific research.
Website of the conference: lib.amu.edu.pl/konferencja-naukowa-bibliometryczne-analizy-otwartej-nauki