Introduction
I am sure you have already heard of Wikipedia, right ? Every high-school student has already used it in
order to cook up the best presentation for his History class ! With more than 6 million English
articles, Wikipedia can be seen as the world's largest and most-read reference work in history. It might
be easy to get lost in this mass of information. However, the platform proposes a quick and easy way to
navigate between the millions of articles through the usage of hyperlinks connecting different articles.
For example, these blue links are super useful to go from
Christopher Columbus’ Wikipedia page,
to the one of the
Americas, but not only ! Indeed,
these hyperlinks can give a real insight into the cultural connections that exist between diverse concepts,
such as historical figures and geographical locations. As a game, Wikispeedia provides even more information
in that direction !
Wikispeedia who?
Wikispeedia is a game developed by
EPFL Data Science Lab based on
Wikipedia articles. The rules are simple: you are given two Wikipedia articles, and starting from the
first article, your goal is to reach the second one, exclusively by following hyperlinks in the
articles you encounter.
The information about the article paths chosen by the players is collected and allows to build the
Wikispeedia dataset.
Interested in playing a game of Wikispeedia ? Click the
yellow link !
Why is it useful ?
The Wikispeedia dataset provides link paths made by players attempting to join two different concepts.
But why is it useful and how can we use this ?
In fact, these connection paths between articles exhibit patterns from the player’s notions of these
concepts. For example, in people's minds Christopher Columbus is known for discovering the Americas
and not for music or arts. Thus, players will most likely click on the link targeting the Wikipedia
article on Americas.
The interesting part is that from these connection paths we can build a connectivity graph. This graph
allows us to construct a representation of Wikispeedia users’ reality, described through the centrality
of countries, peoples and other concepts in this graph !
In the end, a new and reduced vision of the world can be built using data from the players’ games. This
website is dedicated to constructing this summarizing vision of the world: WikiWorld ! We also question
the existing differences with our real world: does this representation of Wikispeedia users' reality
correspond to our own ?
Ready to build the Wikiworld ?