Digital history meets Wikipedia: Analyzing historical persons in Wikipedia

Wikipedia is the result of a collaborative effort aiming to represent human knowledge and to make it accessible for everyone. As such it contains lots of contemporary as well as history-related information. This research looks into historical data available in Wikipedia to explore its various time-related characteristics. In particular, we study Wikipedia articles on historical persons. Our analysis sheds new light on the characteristics of information about historical persons in Wikipedia and quantifies user interest in such data. We use signals derived from the hyperlink structure of Wikipedia as well as from article view logs and we overlay them over temporal dimension to understand relations between time, link structure and article popularity. In the latter part of the paper, we also demonstrate different ways for estimating person importance based on the temporal aspects of the link structure.