#Wikipedia on Twitter: analyzing tweets about Wikipedia

Abstract

Wikipedia has long become a standard source of information on the web and as such is widely referenced on the web and in social media. This paper analyzes the usage of Wikipedia on Twitter by looking into languages used on both platforms, content features of posted articles and recent edits of those articles. The analysis is based on a set of four million tweets and links these tweets to Wikipedia articles and their features to identify interesting relations. We find that within English and Japanese tweets containing a link to Wikipedia, 97% of the links lead to the English resp. Japanese Wikipedia, whereas for other languages 20% of the tweets contain a link to a Wikipedia of a different language. Our results also indicate that the number of tweets about a certain topic is not correlated to the number of recent edits on the particular page at the time of sending the tweet.