The People’s Encyclopedia Under the Gaze of the Sages: A Systematic Review of Scholarly Research on Wikipedia

Abstract

Wikipedia has become one of the ten most visited sites on the Web, and the world’s leading source of Web reference information. Its rapid success has inspired hundreds of scholars from various disciplines to study its content, communication and community dynamics from various perspectives. This article presents a systematic review of scholarly research on Wikipedia. We describe our detailed, rigorous methodology for identifying over 450 scholarly studies of Wikipedia. We present the WikiLit website (http wikilit dot referata dot com), where most of the papers reviewed here are described in detail. In the major section of this article, we then categorize and summarize the studies. An appendix features an extensive list of resources useful for Wikipedia researchers.

Keywords: Wikipedia, systematic literature review, encyclopedias, Web 2.0, social media, online collaboration, mass collaboration, information retrieval, information extraction, natural language processing, ontologies, open content, Creative Commons, motivations, online culture, Web references