[WikiEN-l] community hierararchy of the Wikipedia graph

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/3/10 Dmitry Lizorkin <lizorkin at ispras.ru>:
> Hello!
>
> We recently studied the properties of the English Wikipedia graph and
> observed that:
>  (1) the graph consists of dense subgraphs (socalled "graph communities")
> that are in turn less densely connected to each other;
>  (2) Wikipedia articles falling into the same community exhibit more
> semantic similarity to each other than randomly selected articles.
>
> Encouraged by the above observations, i computed the community hierarchy for
> the English Wikipedia:
> http://modis.ispras.ru/wikipedia/
> The hierarchy shows the grouping of similar Wikipedia articles into
> communities, based on purely Wikipedia link information, and reflects the
> link structure of the Wikipedia graph.
>
> In your opinion, could such data organization be helpful for navigation and
> finding related information in Wikipedia?

The idea seems interesting, but your interface doesn't seem to work
very well - as far as I can tell, there is no way to get a list of the
members (and/or subcommunities) of a community, just search within it.
A list would be much more useful.

One use I can see for this software is suggestions for categories.
Either suggesting that a particular article be added to a category
(because most of the other articles it its community are already
members) or suggesting that a new category be created (if there is no
category containing a significant number of members of a community).
The software would need to take subcategories into account, of course
- eg. if two members of a community are in different subcategories of
the same category that is probably intentional and the software
shouldn't suggest changing it.