In recent decades, the rapid growth of Internet adoption is offering opportunities for convenient and inexpensive access to scientific information. Wikipedia, one of the largest encyclopedias worldwide, has become a reference in this respect, and has attracted widespread attention from scholars. However, a clear understanding of the scientific sources underpinning Wikipedia's contents remains elusive. In this work, we rely on an open dataset of citations from Wikipedia to map the relationship between Wikipedia articles and scientific journal articles. We find that most journal articles cited from Wikipedia belong to STEM fields, in particular biology and medicine ($47.6$\% of citations; $46.1$\% of cited articles). Furthermore, Wikipedia's biographies play an important role in connecting STEM fields with the humanities, especially history. These results contribute to our understanding of Wikipedia's reliance on scientific sources, and its role as knowledge broker to the public.
翻译:近几十年来,通过互联网的迅速发展为方便和廉价地获取科学信息提供了机会。维基百科是全世界最大的百科全书之一,它已成为这方面的参考,并吸引了学者的广泛关注。然而,对维基百科内容背后的科学来源的清晰了解仍然难以实现。在这项工作中,我们依靠维基百科引用的公开数据集来绘制维基百科文章和科学期刊文章之间的关系图。我们发现维基百科引用的大多数期刊文章都属于STEM领域,特别是生物学和医学领域(引用47.6美元;引用文章46.1美元 ) 。此外,维基百科的生物学在将STEM领域与人文、特别是历史联系起来方面发挥了重要作用。这些成果有助于我们了解维基百科对科学来源的依赖及其作为公众知识中介的作用。