Wikipedia and Westminster: Quality and Dynamics of Wikipedia Pages about UK Politicians


Abstract

Wikipedia is a major source of information providing a large variety of content online, trusted by readers from around the world. Readers go to Wikipedia to get reliable information about different subjects, one of the most popular being living people, and especially politicians. While a lot is known about the general usage and information consumption on Wikipedia, less is known about the life-cycle and quality of Wikipedia articles in the context of politics. The aim of this study is to quantify and qualify content production and consumption for articles about politicians, with a specific focus on UK Members of Parliament (MPs). First,we analyze spatio-temporal patterns of readers' and editors' engagement with MPs' Wikipedia pages, finding huge peaks of attention during election times, related to signs of engagement on other social media (e.g. Twitter). Second, we quantify editors' polarisation and find that most editors specialize in a specific party and choose specific news outlets as references. Finally we observe that the average citation quality is pretty high, with statements on 'Early life and career' missing citations most often (18%).






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Wikipedia and Westminster Dataset

The data collected in this research is being made available to the research community. If you are interested in using this data, please send us an email according to the Request Data section and indicate which of following parts you need in the email.

  1. Page Views Dataset: In CSV format, contains views per day on MPs Wikipedia pages.

  2. Page Edits Dataset: In CSV format, contains edits record per MP.

  3. Page Content Dataset: In CSV format, contains section-wise page content for each MP.

  4. Position Held Dataset: In CSV format, contains all positions held (Eg. Prime Minister) by MPs.

You can find the format of the dataset from here.


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If you are interested in using this data, email us to get the link where you can download the data.

We are sharing the dataset under the terms and conditions specified here and following Twitter's Terms of Usage. Please note that submitting the form indicates that you accept the terms and conditions of the data. In the form, please indicate which part of the dataset you need. If you do not get any email notification for your logged request within 24 hours, please e-mail us at netsys.noreply[at]gmail.com.

Dataset Terms and Conditions

  1. You will use the data solely for the purpose of non-profit research or non-profit education.

  2. You will respect the privacy of end users and organizations that may be identified in the data. You will not attempt to reverse engineer, decrypt, de-anonymize, derive or otherwise re-identify anonymized information.

  3. You will not distribute the data beyond your immediate research group.

  4. If you create a publication using our datasets, please cite our papers as follows. 


@inproceedings{agarwal2020wikipedia,
  title={Wikipedia and Westminster: Quality and Dynamics of Wikipedia Pages about UK Politicians},
  author={Agarwal, Pushkal and Redi, Miriam and Sastry, Nishanth and Wood, Edward and Blick, Andrew},
   booktitle={Proceedings of the 31st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media},
  year={2020}
}




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