The Substantial Interdependence of Wikipedia and Google: A Case Study on the Relationship Between Peer Production Communities and Information Technologies Connor McMahon1*, Isaac Johnson2*, and Brent Hecht2 *indicates co-First Authors; 1GroupLens Research, University of Minnesota; 2People, Space, and Algorithms (PSA) Computing Group, Northwestern University
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[email protected] Abstract broader information technology ecosystem. This ecosystem While Wikipedia is a subject of great interest in the com- contains potentially critical relationships that could affect puting literature, very little work has considered Wikipedia’s Wikipedia as much as or more than any changes to internal important relationships with other information technologies sociotechnical design. For example, in order for a Wikipedia like search engines. In this paper, we report the results of two page to be edited, it needs to be visited, and search engines deception studies whose goal was to better understand the critical relationship between Wikipedia and Google. These may be a prominent mediator of Wikipedia visitation pat- studies silently removed Wikipedia content from Google terns. If this is the case, search engines may also play a crit- search results and examined the effect of doing so on partici- ical role in helping Wikipedia work towards the goal of pants’ interactions with both websites. Our findings demon- “[providing] every single person on the planet [with] access strate and characterize an extensive interdependence between to the sum of all human knowledge” (Wales 2004). Wikipedia and Google. Google becomes a worse search en- gine for many queries when it cannot surface Wikipedia con- Also remaining largely unexamined are the inverse rela- tent (e.g.