Mapping the Contents in Wikipedia

Augmented Social Cognition

Having just returned from CHI2009 conference on Human-Computer Interaction, many of the topics there focused on where and how people obtain their information, and how they make sense of it all. A recent research topic in our group is understanding how people are using Wikipedia for their information needs. One question that had constantly come up in our discussion around Wikipedia is what is exactly in it. We have so far done most of our analyses around edit patterns, but not so much analysis have gone into what do people write about? What topics are the most well-represented? Where topic areas have the most conflict?

I don't really understand how they came up with this, but they took Wikipedia's own, most basic organization of its categories and figured out how much of Wikipedia is devoted to each. It's an interesting distribution. Pop culture may account for the huge culture category. Looking at the academic subjects, the closer you get to mathematics, the smaller the category. Personally, the farther I get from pop culture, kids and articles about political controversy or politically controversial subjects, the happier my editing on Wikipedia. Here's the breakdown:

30 % Culture and the arts ( 2% of the conflicts)
15 % People and self ( 14% )
14 % Geography and places ( 2% )
12 % Society and social sciences ( 7% )
11 % History and events ( 6% )
9 % Natural and physical sciences ( 10% )
4 % Technology and applied sciences ( 1% )
2 % Religion and belief systems ( 28% )
2 % Health and fitness ( conflicts not even mentioned )
1 % Mathematics and logic ( 1% )
1 % Philosophy and thinking ( 28% )

Fascinating.

Thank you.