Measuring University Impact: Wikipedia approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method to evaluate university impact by analyzing the popularity of alumni pages on Wikipedia, providing a complementary perspective to traditional rankings.

Contribution

It proposes a novel Wikipedia-based methodology for assessing university impact through alumni page views and compares it with established rankings.

Findings

Higher page-views for contemporary alumni indicate the method's effectiveness.

The Wikipedia alumni ranking correlates strongly with webpage popularity rankings.

Some top universities are consistently ranked across different evaluation methods.

Abstract

The impact of Universities on the social, economic and political landscape is one of the key directions in contemporary educational evaluation. In this paper, we discuss the new methodological technique that evaluates the impact of university based on popularity (number of page-views) of their alumni's pages on Wikipedia. It allows revealing the alumni popularity dynamics and tracking its state. Preliminary analysis shows that the number of page-views is higher for the contemporary persons that prove the perspectives of this approach. Then, universities were ranked based on the methodology and compared to the famous international university rankings ARWU and QS based only on alumni scales: for the top 10 universities, there is an intersection of two universities (Columbia University, Stanford University). The correlation coefficients between different university rankings are provided in the paper. Finally, the ranking based on the alumni popularity was compared with the ranking of universities based on the popularity of their webpages on Wikipedia: there is a strong connection between these indicators.