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Is Wikipedia Easy to Understand?: A Study Beyond Conventional Readability Metrics

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Advances in Computational Collective Intelligence (ICCCI 2021)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1463))

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Abstract

Wikipedia has emerged to be one of the most prominent sources of information available on the Internet today. It provides a collaborative platform for editors to edit and share their information, making Wikipedia a valuable source of information. The Wikipedia articles have been duly studied from an editor’s point of view. But, the analysis of Wikipedia from the reader’s perspective is yet to be studied. Since Wikipedia serves as an encyclopedia of information for its users, its role as an information securing tool must be examined. The readability of a written text plays a major role in imparting the intended comprehension to its readers. Readability is the ease with which a reader can understand the underlying piece of text. In this paper, we study the readability of various Wikipedia articles. Apart from judging the readability of Wikipedia articles against standard readability metrics, we introduce some new parameters related specifically to the comprehension of the text present in Wikipedia articles. These new parameters, combined with standard readability metrics, help classify the Wikipedia articles into comprehensible and non-comprehensible classes through the SVM classification technique.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics.

  2. 2.

    https://tools.wmflabs.org/siteviews.

  3. 3.

    https://tools.wmflabs.org/topviews.

  4. 4.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Content_assessment.

  5. 5.

    https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar, India

    Simran Setia, S. R. S. Iyengar, Amit Arjun Verma & Neeru Dubey

Authors
  1. Simran Setia
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  2. S. R. S. Iyengar
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  3. Amit Arjun Verma
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  4. Neeru Dubey
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Simran Setia .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Wrocław, Poland

    Krystian Wojtkiewicz

  2. VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Jan Treur

  3. University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

    Elias Pimenidis

  4. Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Wrocław, Poland

    Marcin Maleszka

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Setia, S., Iyengar, S.R.S., Verma, A.A., Dubey, N. (2021). Is Wikipedia Easy to Understand?: A Study Beyond Conventional Readability Metrics. In: Wojtkiewicz, K., Treur, J., Pimenidis, E., Maleszka, M. (eds) Advances in Computational Collective Intelligence. ICCCI 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1463. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88113-9_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88113-9_14

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-88112-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-88113-9

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