Mapping knowledge domains on Wikipedia: an author bibliographic coupling analysis of traditional Chinese medicine

Wikipedia has the lofty goal of compiling all human knowledge. The purpose of the present study is to map the structure of the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) knowledge domain on Wikipedia, to identify patterns of knowledge representation on Wikipedia and to test the applicability of author bibliographic coupling analysis, an effective method for mapping knowledge domains represented in published scholarly documents, for Wikipedia data.

We adapted and followed the well-established procedures and techniques for author bibliographic coupling analysis (ABCA). Instead of bibliographic data from a citation database, we used all articles on TCM downloaded from the English version of Wikipedia as our dataset. An author bibliographic coupling network was calculated and then factor analyzed using SPSS. Factor analysis results were visualized. Factors were labeled upon manual examination of articles that authors who load primarily in each factor have significantly contributed references to. Clear factors were interpreted as topics.

Seven TCM topic areas are represented on Wikipedia, among which Acupuncture-related practices, Falun Gong and Herbal Medicine attracted the most significant contributors to TCM. Acupuncture and Qi Gong have the most connections to the TCM knowledge domain and also serve as bridges for other topics to connect to the domain. Herbal medicine is weakly linked to and non-herbal medicine is isolated from the rest of the TCM knowledge domain. It appears that specific topics are represented well on Wikipedia but their conceptual connections are not. ABCA is effective for mapping knowledge domains on Wikipedia but document-based bibliographic coupling analysis is not.

Given the prominent position of Wikipedia for both information users and for researchers on knowledge organization and information retrieval, it is important to study how well knowledge is represented and structured on Wikipedia. Such studies appear largely missing although studies from different perspectives both about Wikipedia and using Wikipedia as data are abundant. Author bibliographic coupling analysis is effective for mapping knowledge domains represented in published scholarly documents but has never been applied to mapping knowledge domains represented on Wikipedia.