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The Induction of Learning Through the Dense Link Structure of Wikipedia 202 International Conference on e-resources in higher education: Issues, Developments, Opportunities and Challenges THE INDUCTION OF LEARNING THROUGH THE DENSE LINK STRUCTURE OF WIKIPEDIA Jayaraj J.R. Research Scholar Dept. of Library and Information Science University of Kerala [email protected] ABSTRACT Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia built around the wiki architecture. It allows the collaborative development of knowledge which is a feature of Web 2.0. The dense link structure is one of the important characteristics of Wikipedia and it facilitates strong interlinking among articles and concepts. The relationship of concepts as depicted in Wikipedia expresses connectivity among various articles and shows their semantic relationship. The link architecture helps to produce cognitive mapping of the concepts in learner thereby induces the learning experience. It makes a concept more understandable by its relationship with another. This paper explains the dense link structure of Wikipedia and examines the link structure around the concept ' Bibliometrics '. Keywords: Learning, Wikipedia, Link Structure, Bibliometrics Introduction Discussion Information Technology has played a Wikipedia constructive role in the creation, storage and Wikipedia is a free, multilingual encyclopedia transfer of information in various forms and project supported by the non-profit Wikipedia formats. It has revolutionized the world by Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words providing sophisticated tools to manage information wiki a technology for creating collaborative web efficiently and effectively. The ever growing nature sites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning of information has its reflections on the technology ‘quick’ and encyclopedia. It is launched in January as well. As a result new models of information 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. It is creation and codification and transfer are taking considered the most popular general reference work place. on the Internet. Wikipedia is based on the MediaWiki software. A wiki is a simple content Wikipedia is the world's largest and most management system, which is especially geared popular online encyclopedia. Wikipedia started in towards enabling the reader to change and enhance 2001. It's online, free to use, and free of advertising. the content of the website easily. The idea of Wikipedia contains more than 14 million volunteer- Wikipedia is to allow everyone to edit and extend authored articles in over 250 languages, and is the encyclopedic content.2 visited by more than 330 million people every month, making it the number five most-popular site Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia built in the world. It is a collaborative creation that has around the wiki architecture. The dense link been added to and edited by millions of people structure is one of the most interesting during the past eight years: anyone can edit it, at characteristics of Wikipedia. “Dense" means that it any time. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia has a lot of inner links, links from pages in provides an unprecedented example of large-scale, Wikipedia to other pages in Wikipedia. This means worldwide collaboration. Wikipedia is the largest that articles are strongly connected by means of collection of shared knowledge in human history, hyperlinks. The semantic relatedness of concepts as and the people who support it are united by their seen in Wikipedia leads to this study. This love of learning, their intellectual curiosity, and relationship will induce the conceptual analysis of their awareness that we know much more together, ideas. It makes a concept more understandable by than any of us does alone.1 its relationship with another concept. 19th & 20th Feb. 2010, Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli. 203 International Conference on e-resources in higher education: Issues, Developments, Opportunities and Challenges Link Structure indicate synonym terms, but can also be The dense link structure is one of the most abbreviations, more scientific or more common interesting characteristics of Wikipedia. “Dense” terms, frequent misspellings or alternative spellings means that it has a lot of “inner links,” links from etc 3 pages in Wikipedia to other pages in Wikipedia. This means that articles are strongly connected by Semantic network many hyperlinks. By analyzing the link structure, A semantic network is a network which we can extract various information such as topic represents semantic relations among concepts. This locality, site topology, and summary information. is often used as a form of knowledge representation. Topic locality is the law that Web pages which are It is a directed or undirected graph consisting of sharing the same links have more topically similar vertices, which represent concepts, and edges. contents than pages which are not sharing links. Inductive Learning Link Types Inductive learning is essentially learning by Wikipedia contains several types of links such example. The process itself ideally implies some as inter-language links, category links and redirect method for drawing conclusions about previously links. All of them have impressive characteristics unseen examples once learning is complete. More and are useful information representation. formally, one might state: Given a set of training examples, develop a hypothesis that is as consistent An inter-language link is a link between two as possible with the provided data articles in different languages. The titles of two articles connected by an inter-language link are Techniques for modeling the inductive translations of each other. Currently, Wikipedia learning process include: Quinlan's decision trees supports over 250 languages including major (results from information theory are used to languages, minor languages and auxiliary languages partition data based on maximizing "information (such as Esperanto), and has a dense link structure content" of a given sub-classification) , among major languages. connectionism (most neural network models rely on training techniques that seek to infer a relationship A category link is a link which is used to from examples) and decision list techniques , define taxonomic relation between an article and a among others. 4 category in Wikipedia. In other words, a category link is used to define what category the article Bibliometrics belongs to. Furthermore, category links are also Bibliometrics is a set of methods used to study used to define relations between categories. It is or measure texts and information. Citation analysis widely known that Wikipedia’s category tree is well and content analysis are commonly used organized and it is already used in various bibliometric methods. While bibliometric methods researches such as semantic relatedness are most often used in the field of library and measurement and semantic relation extraction. This information science, bibliometrics have wide category tree reflects the taxonomy of concepts. applications in other areas. In fact, many research fields use bibliometric methods to explore the Redirect pages in Wikipedia are pages impact of their field, the impact of a set of containing no content but a link to another article researchers, or the impact of a particular paper. (target page) in order to facilitate the access to Bibliometrics are now used in quantitative research Wikipedia content. When a user accesses a redirect assessment exercises of academic output which is page, he will automatically be redirected to the 5 target page. Redirect pages are usually strongly starting to threaten practice based research. related to the concept of the target page. They often Table 1.Category of Bibliometrics as seen in Wikipedia Bibliometrics Acknowledgment index Bibliogram Bibliographic coupling Christine L. Borgman Bradford's law Citation analysis Citation index G-index Eugene Garfield H-b index H-index Histcite Immediacy index Impact factor Journal Citation Journal ranking Lotka's law Derek J. de Solla Price Scientometrics Reports 19th & 20th Feb. 2010, Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli. 204 International Conference on e-resources in higher education: Issues, Developments, Opportunities and Challenges A query in Google has been done to analyze structure as seen in Wikipedia can induct the how many other articles in Wikipedia has link to the learning process. page ‘Bibliometrics’ using the query statement ‘Bibliometricssite:en.wikipedia.org’ retrieved 62 Reference hits. It indicates that the concept ‘Bibliometrics’ has en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliometrics related to several other concepts in Wikipedia itself. With the retrieved hits a concept map can be formed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia which reflects the interlinking of concepts in Inductive Learning. Retrieved from Wikipedia. www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/AI2/node144.html on 25th Dec 2009 Conclusion The articles in Wikipedia are strongly Wikipedia Thesaurus and the Web Services - interlinked by the hyperlinks. This leads to Towards an ontology intermediator. Retrieved conceptual interpretation of facts. When the user fromwww.cs.vu.nl/~pmika/swc-2007/WikiLa navigates through the hyperlinks it causes him to go b. pdf on 22th Dec 2009 through the interconnection of ideas. The induction of learning is achieved through the connections of www.en.wikipedia.org articles through hyperlinks. Hence the dense link 19th & 20th Feb. 2010, Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli. .
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