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(a)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_citat…
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
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