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Volunteered Geographic Information on Wikipedia

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Encyclopedia of GIS

Abstract

There is a large amount of volunteered geographic information in Wikipedia, the free-access, free-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Explicit geographic information is attached to many articles and some users, while approximate geographic information can be inferred for many other articles and users.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia, accessed 11 February 2015.

  2. 2.

    Information on XML and database dumps is available at http://dumps.wikimedia.org/, information on the API is at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page, and information on slave database access is at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs.

  3. 3.

    Wiki markup is also known as wikitext and is described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wiki_markup

  4. 4.

    Further details are at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Coord

  5. 5.

    Information from WikiData may be downloaded from https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Database_download, and geographic coordinates are stored in property P625 (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P625)

  6. 6.

    The bot edit flag is only available for recent edits, and not all bots set this flag since it has the effect of hiding edits in the recent changes list on the website.

  7. 7.

    https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/?doc, https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-raw/, and http://stats.grok.se

  8. 8.

    https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Charting_diversity

  9. 9.

    One proposal to open page view data at a finer geographic scale is at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Geo-aggregation_of_Wikipedia_pageviews

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Scott A. Hale

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  1. Scott A. Hale
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Correspondence to Scott A. Hale .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

    Shashi Shekhar

  2. Rutgers Business School, Newark, New Jersey, USA

    Hui Xiong

  3. The University of Iowa Tippie College of Business, Iowa City, Iowa, USA

    Xun Zhou

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Hale, S.A. (2015). Volunteered Geographic Information on Wikipedia. In: Shekhar, S., Xiong, H., Zhou, X. (eds) Encyclopedia of GIS. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23519-6_1655-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23519-6_1655-1

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-23519-6

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