Web2Wiki: Characterizing Wikipedia Linking Across the Web

TL;DR

This study provides a large-scale analysis of how Wikipedia is referenced across the Web, revealing its primary roles and contexts in various online domains, and introduces the Web2Wiki dataset for further research.

Contribution

First large-scale analysis of Wikipedia links across the Web, characterizing their distribution, context, and function, and releasing a comprehensive dataset for future studies.

Findings

Wikipedia is mainly cited by news and science sites for information.

Most links are within main content, not user-generated sections.

95% of links are explanatory references, not evidence or attribution.

Abstract

Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites globally, yet its role beyond its own platform remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present the first large-scale analysis of how Wikipedia is referenced across the Web. Using a dataset from Common Crawl, we identify over 90 million Wikipedia links spanning 1.68% of Web domains and examine their distribution, context, and function. Our analysis of English Wikipedia reveals three key findings: (1) Wikipedia is most frequently cited by news and science websites for informational purposes, while commercial websites reference it less often. (2) The majority of Wikipedia links appear within the main content rather than in boilerplate or user-generated sections, highlighting their role in structured knowledge presentation. (3) Most links (95%) serve as explanatory references rather than as evidence or attribution, reinforcing Wikipedia's function as a background knowledge provider. While this study focuses on English Wikipedia, our publicly released Web2Wiki dataset includes links from multiple language editions, supporting future research on Wikipedia's global influence on the Web.