The Substantial Interdependence of Wikipedia and Google: A Case Study on the Relationship Between Peer Production Communities and Information Technologies
The Substantial Interdependence of Wikipedia and Google: A Case Study on the Relationship Between Peer Production Communities and Information Technologies
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维基百科和谷歌的实质性相互依赖：对等生产社区与信息技术之间关系的案例研究
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发表时间：
2017
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通讯作者：
Brent J. Hecht
中科院分区：
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作者：
Connor McMahon;Isaac L. Johnson;Brent J. Hecht
虽然维基百科是计算机文献中的一个非常感兴趣的主题，但很少有工作考虑维基百科与其他信息技术（如搜索引擎）的重要关系。在本文中，我们报告了两项欺骗研究的结果，其目的是更好地理解维基百科和谷歌之间的关键关系。这些研究悄悄地从谷歌搜索结果中删除了维基百科的内容，并检查了这样做对参与者与两个网站互动的影响。我们的研究结果表明，维基百科和谷歌之间存在广泛的相互依赖关系。当谷歌无法显示维基百科内容时，它对许多查询来说是一个更糟糕的搜索引擎（例如，结果页面上的点击率显着下降），而维基百科内容的重要性可能比搜索算法的许多改进都要大。我们的研究结果还突出了谷歌在为维基百科提供读者方面的关键作用。然而，我们也发现了这种互利关系处于危险之中的证据：谷歌对其搜索结果所做的直接涉及维基百科内容的更改正在显着减少维基百科的流量。总的来说，我们的研究结果认为，研究人员和从业人员应该更深入地考虑同行生产社区和信息技术，使用和表面的内容之间的相互依存关系。
While Wikipedia is a subject of great interest in the computing literature, very little work has considered Wikipedia’s important relationships with other information technologies like search engines. In this paper, we report the results of two deception studies whose goal was to better understand the critical relationship between Wikipedia and Google. These studies silently removed Wikipedia content from Google search results and examined the effect of doing so on participants’ interactions with both websites. Our findings demonstrate and characterize an extensive interdependence between Wikipedia and Google. Google becomes a worse search engine for many queries when it cannot surface Wikipedia content (for example, click-through rates on results pages drop significantly) and the importance of Wikipedia content is likely greater than many improvements to search algorithms. Our results also highlight Google’s critical role in providing readership to Wikipedia. However, we also found evidence that this mutually beneficial relationship is in jeopardy: changes Google has made to its search results that involve directly surfacing Wikipedia content are significantly reducing traffic to Wikipedia. Overall, our findings argue that researchers and practitioners should give deeper consideration to the interdependence between peer production communities and the information technologies that use and surface their content.