Enhancing Navigation on Wikipedia with Social Tags

TL;DR

This paper proposes a social tagging interface for Wikipedia to enhance navigation and search by incorporating user-generated tags, demonstrated through a prototype to evaluate its effectiveness.

Contribution

It introduces a novel social tagging interface for Wikipedia articles, integrating user-defined tags to improve navigation and retrieval.

Findings

Tags provide alternative navigation methods.

Tags improve search relevance and diversity.

Prototype shows positive impact on navigation.

Abstract

Social tagging has become an interesting approach to improve search and navigation over the actual Web, since it aggregates the tags added by different users to the same resource in a collaborative way. This way, it results in a list of weighted tags describing its resource. Combined to a classical taxonomic classification system such as that by Wikipedia, social tags can enhance document navigation and search. On the one hand, social tags suggest alternative navigation ways, including pivot-browsing, popularity-driven navigation, and filtering. On the other hand, it provides new metadata, sometimes uncovered by documents' content, that can substantially improve document search. In this work, the inclusion of an interface to add user-defined tags describing Wikipedia articles is proposed, as a way to improve article navigation and retrieval. As a result, a prototype on applying tags over Wikipedia is proposed in order to evaluate its effectiveness.