Knowing how influential Wikipedia is and how much of our world depends on it is a question many Internet professionals have asked themselves for years. A growing body of work has highlighted the important role that Wikipedia’s volunteer-generated content plays in helping search engines achieve their primary goal of meeting the information needs of hundreds of millions of people. Suffice it to say that Wikipedia links appear in 67-84% of results for common and trending queries.

And not only that. It also has a huge impact outside of your field, and powerful technologies like search engines rely heavily on this free, volunteer-generated content.

Addiction to Google. The interdependencies between Wikipedia and Google are a reality. For many categories of queries, Wikipedia links appear on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) more than any other website. This shows that Wikipedia, a resource created by volunteers, plays an important role in helping Google perform its core function.

Study. In a study conducted by Northwestern University (USA), they discovered that the results largely spread to other search engines. For desktop SERPs, Wikipedia appeared in 81-84% of search results for common queries, 67-72% for trending queries, and 16-54% for medical queries.

Additionally, through spatial analysis, many of these queries are found in the featured area of ​​Wikipedia’s SERPs, without scrolling, both in Knowledge Panel items (a kind of basic encyclopedia to you) and traditional blue links.

What happens if we remove Wikipedia? In another experimental study, a browser extension hid Wikipedia links from Google users, and the authors saw a massive drop in SERP clickthrough rate, which is probably the most important search success metric. The study also discussed the “reuse paradox”: If SERPs don’t provide search engines with links to Wikipedia (or other peer-to-peer generation platforms), they could starve these new communities of members.

They attract visual attention. A number of studies by search engine optimization (SEO) companies have also measured how often Wikipedia appears in SERPs. Rates vary between 34% and 99%. Additionally, it has been shown that visual attention and clicks are directed to higher-ranking links, especially the first two links. In addition to increasing focus and clicks on top-ranking links, they found that in some cases, ads in the right column (where Wikipedia typically appears) can draw as much visual attention as the third and fourth links.

Impact on common knowledge. All this highlights that the characteristics of Wikipedia content will also define the effectiveness of web search, at least in many important areas. One particularly important implication is that Wikipedia content biases will affect search results. There is a large literature trying to understand content bias.

We also take the bad. For queries about overrepresented content on Wikipedia, there is likely to be less high-quality content to answer those queries. In other words, gaps in Wikipedia’s scope or quality can lead to gaps in search engines’ ability to meet users’ information needs. This is a critical area for future work and can clearly explain how certain biases (eg gender, language, rural content, etc.) permeate search technologies.

Fill in the blanks on Wikipedia. There are many active efforts to fill the knowledge gaps in Wikipedia. Because these gaps can harm the Internet as a whole, search engines can have a significant incentive to help fill these gaps. For example, if a user searches for information on a topic that is not sufficiently covered on Wikipedia, search engines may display a SERP item indicating that the user can add the information found in their search to Wikipedia.