Centrality and content creation in networks - The case of economic topics on German wikipedia

摘要

We analyze the role of local and global network positions for content contributions to articles belonging to the category "Economy" on the German Wikipedia. Observing a sample of 7635 articles over a period of 153 weeks we measure their centrality both within this category and in the network of over one million Wikipedia articles. Our analysis reveals that an additional link from the observed category is associated with around 140 bytes of additional content and with an increase in the number of authors by 0.5. The relation of links from outside the category to content creation is much weaker. Beyond the econometric analysis, our study sheds light on how the discipline of economics is represented on German Wikipedia. We find non-neoclassical themes to be highly prevalent among the top articles. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.