Abstract

The paper presents a WikiLinks system that extends the Wikipedia linkage model with bidirectional links between fragments of the articles and overlapping links’ anchors. The proposed model adopts some ideas from the research conducted in a field of nonlinear, computer-aided writing, often called a hypertext. WikiLinks may be considered as a web augmentation tool but it presents a new approach to the problem that addresses the specific nature of Wikipedia. The system, rather than working on the HTML level, works on the wiki code level and augments the Wikipedia content on the parsing phase. WikiLinks is shipped with a new kind of wiki code parser – a parallel markup parser, that allows applying externally-stored links to the content in an elegant way. The system also addresses the problem of bidirectional links' anchors adjustments on the articles' changes, provides a special link evolution procedure and handles the link’s visibility problem. According to our knowledge, this is the first attempt that brings bidirectional links directly to Wikipedia. One of the possible applications of bidirectional fragment-fragment links are associative links. An associative link is a connection between two document fragments that are related to each other in some sense. The new link type extends the current Wikipedia linkage model, dominated by definitional links and provides us an additional tool for content organization, that might be useful for still-growing Wikipedia’s article base. The associative links are from their nature more subjective that definitional ones. In order to test the relevance of this new linkage model, we conducted experiment that checked if the associative links created by one person are understandable to others. The obtained results are very promising and show the usefulness of a new linkage model for Wikipedia.

Citations

Authors (3)