I was pleased to have been invited to present at the January 2025 Wikimedia Research Showcase. I spoke about my work from my PhD on networks of collective attention, research on depths of wikipedia, and recent work on the WikiReddit dataset. Abstract below, and you can find the video of the talk here.
Collective Attention Across Wikipedia and the Web
Wikipedia, as one of the most popular websites globally, serves as an important indicator of collective attention online. Readers of news and social media often turn to Wikipedia as a secondary resource for supporting or clarifying information, and this is reflected in the patterns of page views and edits on the online encyclopaedia. Wikipedia is also not just a vast repository of information; it is a network of interconnected articles that exists within the broader ecosystem of the World Wide Web. To fully comprehend the dynamics of online popularity, we must study how individuals navigate between articles and how external platforms drive traffic to Wikipedia, not just Wikipedia articles (or alternative online records) in isolation. In this talk, I will review research on how major news events spark networked surges of collective attention to Wikipedia articles, how Twitter users both navigate and contribute to Wikipedia in response to viral social media content, and how we can combine data from Reddit and Wikipedia to study patterns of attention towards current events, influxes of traffic from social media towards Wikipedia, and the use of Wikipedia in discussions on social media.
