Breadth of Wikipedia coverage
A new article by Alexander Halavais and Derek Lackaff in the excellent Journal of Computer Mediated Communication examines the breadth of topics covered by Wikipedia. This graph from the paper shows the relative coverage of Wikipedia by topic versus books in print:
It’s interesting to see where the significant differences are. Wikipedia seems to have a lot of coverage of music, geography, history and science. It doesn’t do so well in social science, law and medicine, relative to books. I guess this reflects the underlying incentives to contribute to Wikipedia. People may be knowledgeable about geography or history because it’s their hobby or it interests them. I have not yet met anyone whose hobby is the law. And real lawyers probably have high opportunity costs of writing Wikipedia articles about law.
2 Comments
That’s interesting. I would have thought that professions that are heavily regulated would have fewer articles in Wikipedia because of the barriers to entry and the arguement that these are specialized professions. In that respect, Law and Medicine and select social sciences confirm the hypothesis. I am surprised about politics though because a good number of people hold strong political opinions.
#Owinok:
It is a little surprising on the political stuff. But if you take a look at the Obama article, for example, you will find that although controversy makes the process more difficult, it also motivates passionate editors to back up their assertions, etc.