Wikipedia Text Reuse

Within and Without

authored by

Milad Alshomary, Michael Völske, Tristan Licht, Henning Wachsmuth, Benno Stein, Matthias Hagen, Martin Potthast

Abstract

We study text reuse related to Wikipedia at scale by compiling the first corpus of text reuse cases within Wikipedia as well as without (i.e., reuse of Wikipedia text in a sample of the Common Crawl). To discover reuse beyond verbatim copy and paste, we employ state-of-the-art text reuse detection technology, scaling it for the first time to process the entire Wikipedia as part of a distributed retrieval pipeline. We further report on a pilot analysis of the 100 million reuse cases inside, and the 1.6 million reuse cases outside Wikipedia that we discovered. Text reuse inside Wikipedia gives rise to new tasks such as article template induction, fixing quality flaws, or complementing Wikipedia’s ontology. Text reuse outside Wikipedia yields a tangible metric for the emerging field of quantifying Wikipedia’s influence on the web. To foster future research into these tasks, and for reproducibility’s sake, the Wikipedia text reuse corpus and the retrieval pipeline are made freely available.

External Organisation(s)

Paderborn University
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg
Leipzig University

Type

Conference contribution

Pages

747-754

No. of pages

8

Publication date

2019

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Theoretical Computer Science, Computer Science(all)

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15712-8_49 (Access: Closed)