Measuring University Impact: Wikipedia Approach

The impact of universities on the social, economic, and political landscape is one of the key directions in contemporary educational evaluation. In this paper, we discuss the new methodological technique that evaluates the impact of university based on popularity (number of page-views) of their alumni’s pages on Wikipedia. It allows revealing the alumni popularity dynamics and tracking its state. Preliminary analysis shows that the number of page-views is higher for the contemporary persons that prove the perspectives of this approach. Then, universities were ranked based on the methodology and compared to the famous international university rankings ARWU and QS based only on alumni scales: for the top 10 universities, there is an intersection of two universities (Columbia University, Stanford University). The correlation coefficients between different university rankings are provided in the paper. Finally, the ranking based on the alumni popularity was compared with the ranking of universities based on the popularity of their webpages on Wikipedia: there is a strong connection between these indicators.