# Insights into Entity Name Evolution on Wikipedia

## TL;DR

This paper investigates how Wikipedia can be used to understand the evolution of entity names over time, addressing challenges in information retrieval from web archives with changing entity identities.

## Contribution

It introduces a method to analyze Wikipedia for entity name changes and assesses its suitability as a knowledge source for tracking entity evolution.

## Key findings

- Wikipedia contains valuable data on entity name changes.
- Automatic extraction of name change excerpts is feasible.
- Wikipedia is a promising source for studying entity evolution.

## Abstract

Working with Web archives raises a number of issues caused by their temporal characteristics. Depending on the age of the content, additional knowledge might be needed to find and understand older texts. Especially facts about entities are subject to change. Most severe in terms of information retrieval are name changes. In order to find entities that have changed their name over time, search engines need to be aware of this evolution. We tackle this problem by analyzing Wikipedia in terms of entity evolutions mentioned in articles regardless the structural elements. We gathered statistics and automatically extracted minimum excerpts covering name changes by incorporating lists dedicated to that subject. In future work, these excerpts are going to be used to discover patterns and detect changes in other sources. In this work we investigate whether or not Wikipedia is a suitable source for extracting the required knowledge.