A Map of Science in Wikipedia

TL;DR

This paper maps the scientific sources cited in Wikipedia, revealing a strong focus on STEM fields and highlighting Wikipedia's role in connecting science with the humanities, especially through biographies.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of Wikipedia's scientific citations, illustrating the fields most represented and its function as a knowledge broker.

Findings

Most citations are from biology and medicine (47.6%)

Biographies link STEM and humanities, especially history

Wikipedia relies heavily on scientific sources for its content

Abstract

In recent decades, the rapid growth of Internet adoption is offering opportunities for convenient and inexpensive access to scientific information. Wikipedia, one of the largest encyclopedias worldwide, has become a reference in this respect, and has attracted widespread attention from scholars. However, a clear understanding of the scientific sources underpinning Wikipedia's contents remains elusive. In this work, we rely on an open dataset of citations from Wikipedia to map the relationship between Wikipedia articles and scientific journal articles. We find that most journal articles cited from Wikipedia belong to STEM fields, in particular biology and medicine ($47.6$\% of citations; $46.1$\% of cited articles). Furthermore, Wikipedia's biographies play an important role in connecting STEM fields with the humanities, especially history. These results contribute to our understanding of Wikipedia's reliance on scientific sources, and its role as knowledge broker to the public.