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“The Sum of All Human Knowledge”: A Systematic Review of Scholarly Research on the Content
of Wikipedia
Wikipedia may be the best-developed attempt thus far to gather all human knowledge in one place. Its accomplishments
in this regard have made it a point of inquiry
for researchers from different fields of knowledge. A
decade of research has thrown light on many aspects of
the Wikipedia community, its processes, and its content.
However, due to the variety of fields inquiring about
Wikipedia and the limited synthesis of the extensive
research, there is little consensus on many aspects of
Wikipedia’s content as an encyclopedic collection of
human knowledge. This study addresses the issue by
systematically reviewing 110 peer-reviewed publications
on Wikipedia content, summarizing the current findings,
and highlighting the major research trends. Two major
streams of research are identified: the quality of Wikipedia
content (including comprehensiveness, currency,
readability, and reliability) and the size of Wikipedia.
Moreover, we present the key research trends in terms
of the domains of inquiry, research design, data source,
and data gathering methods. This review synthesizes
scholarly understanding of Wikipedia content and paves
the way for future studies.
Mostafa Mesgari and Chitu Okoli
John Molson School of Business, Concordia University, 1450 Guy Street, Montreal, Quebec H3H 0A1,
Canada. E-mail: mmesgari@jmsb.concordia.ca, Chitu.Okoli@concordia.ca
Mohamad Mehdi
Computer Science, Concordia University, 1515 Sainte-Catherine Street West, Montreal, Quebec H3G 1M8,
Canada. E-mail: mo_mehdi@encs.concordia.ca
Finn Årup Nielsen
DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark, Richard Petersens Plads, Building 324, DK-2800 Kongens
Lyngby, Denmark. E-mail: fn@imm.dtu.dk
Arto Lanamäki
Department of Information Processing Science, University of Oulu, PO Box 3000, FI-90014 Oulun yliopisto,
Finland. E-mail: arto.lanamaki@oulu.fi
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