Science Fiction and Fantasy in Wikipedia: Exploring Structural and Semantic Cues

TL;DR

This paper investigates how structural and semantic features of Wikipedia articles can be used to identify content related to science fiction and fantasy, addressing challenges posed by overlapping genre boundaries and community biases.

Contribution

It introduces a method leveraging Wikipedia's structural and semantic cues to improve classification of SF/F articles, considering community biases and incomplete data.

Findings

Structural and semantic features effectively distinguish SF/F articles.

Community biases influence article classification accuracy.

Combining multiple signals improves identification performance.

Abstract

Identifying which Wikipedia articles are related to science fiction, fantasy, or their hybrids is challenging because genre boundaries are porous and frequently overlap. Wikipedia nonetheless offers machine-readable structure beyond text, including categories, internal links (wikilinks), and statements if corresponding Wikidata items. However, each of these signals reflects community conventions and can be biased or incomplete. This study examines structural and semantic features of Wikipedia articles that can be used to identify content related to science fiction and fantasy (SF/F).