Yes, we've parsed some citation data in the past and there are graduated levels of interpretability... especially since we aim to look at citations over time, early revisions are likely to have more variation than those in more recent years when there have been more tools available to help people format. Around 2005 I built a mediawiki extension (well, it turned out to be a fork really) that structured the insertion of reference data in an article and stored it in a separate reference table in the database. How I wish I had figured out how to make that a scalable tool then, so we wouldn't have this problem now!
One thing we've discussed is that although what we are really interested in is the sources--what references point to--our ability to do understand what those sources are is limited by how well we can successfully parse and extract the reference text itself.
On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 7:59 AM, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote:
Just a couple of thoughts that cross my mind ...
If people use the {{cite book}} etc templates, it will be relatively easy to work out what the components of the citation are. However if people roll their own, e.g.
<ref>[http://someurl This And That], Blah Blah 2000</ref>
you may have some difficulty working out what is what. I've just been though a tedious exercise of updating a set of URLs using AWB over some thousands of articles and some of the ways people roll their own citations were quite remarkable (and often quite unhelpful). It may be that you can't extract much from such citations. However, the good news is that if they have a URL in them, it will probably be in plain-sight.
Whereas there are a number of templates that I regularly use for citation like {{cite QHR}} (currently 1234 transclusions) and {{cite QPN}} (currently 2738 transclusions) and {{Census 2011 AUS}} (4400 transclusions) all of which generate their URLs. I'm not sure how you will deal with these in terms of extracting URLs.
But whatever the limitations, it will be a useful dataset to answer some interesting questions.
One phenomena I often see is new users updating information (e.g. changing the population of a town) while leaving behind the old citation for the previous value. So it superficially looks like the new information is cited to a reliable source when in fact it isn't. I've often wished we could automatically detect and raise a "warning" when the "text being supported" by the citation changes yet the citation does not. The problem, of course, is that we only know where the citation appears in the text and that we presume it is in support for "some earlier" text (without being clear exactly where it is). And if an article is reorganised, it may well result in the citation "drifting away" from the text it supports or even that it is in support of text that has been deleted. So I think it is important to know what text preceded the citation at the time the citation first appears in the article history as it may be useful to compare it against the text that *now* appears before it. It is a great pity that (in these digital times) we have not developed a citation model where you select chunks of text and link your citation to them, so that the relationship between the text and the citation is more apparent.
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andrea Forte Sent: Tuesday, 2 May 2017 5:18 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities < Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Citation Project - Comments Welcome!
Hi all,
One of my PhD students, Meen Chul Kim, is a data scientist with experience in bibliometrics and we will be working on some citation-related research together with Aaron and Dario in the coming months. Our main goal in the short term is to develop an enhanced citation dataset that will allow for future analyses of citation data associated with article quality, lifecycle, editing trends, etc.
The project page is here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Understanding_ the_context_of_citations_in_Wikipedia
The project is just getting started so this is a great time to offer feedback and suggestions, especially for features of citations that we should mine as a first step, since this will affect what the dataset can be used for in the future.
Looking forward to seeing some of you at WikiCite!!
Andrea
-- :: Andrea Forte :: Associate Professor :: College of Computing and Informatics, Drexel University :: http://www.andreaforte.net _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l