“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