Examining the "leftness" property of Wikipedia categories

Wikipedia's rich category structure has helped make it one of the largest semantic taxonomies in existence, a property that has been central to much recent research. However, Wikipedia's category representation is simplistic: an article contains a single list of categories, with no data about their relative importance. We investigate the ordering of category lists to determine how a category's position in the list correlates with its relevance to the article and overall significance. We identify a number of interesting connections between a category's position and its persistence within the article, age, popularity, size, and descriptiveness.