Top news cites referenced from Wikipedia
Jodi Scheider has just alerted the wiki research mailing list about Ed Summers’ recent statistics on outgoing links from Wikipedia: The top hosts referenced in Wikipedia.
NIH with PubMed is the big one, followed by the DOI resolver site, IMDb and Google Books. Surpricingly you will find edwardbetts.com as number five! I wonder if it has anything to do with his Find link Wikipedia web service. Almost a month ago I changed my old Perl program that I used for the Scientific citations in Wikipedia paper to look into the ‘cite news’ template instead and examine the outgoing links from this template. Such an analysis will look specifically on news citations. On the top twenty list for an 2008 English Wikipedia dump I found: 1 14443 news.bbc.co.uk
2 3224 www.nytimes.com
3 2729 query.nytimes.com
4 2675 www.washingtonpost.com
5 1838 www.cnn.com
6 1781 www.guardian.co.uk
7 1584 www.time.com
8 1443 www.telegraph.co.uk
9 1420 www.smh.com.au
10 1278 www.usatoday.com
11 1198 www.abc.net.au
12 1119 www.variety.com
13 1026 select.nytimes.com
14 1006 www.theage.com.au
15 1005 www.timesonline.co.uk
16 987 www.sfgate.com
17 975 sports.espn.go.com
18 969 www.msnbc.msn.com
19 913 findarticles.com
20 904 www.news.com.au
The topper news.bbc.co.uk is also the top news site in the list that Ed Summers created. I expected BBC, New York Times and Washington Post to be high on the list, but not that BBC would be so well ahead of the others. The Australians are coming along well, and their first is Sydney Morning Herald
I get The Hindu as 39, Haaretz 62, while English Al Jazeera is down on number 100. The most template-linked Danish news source is Politiken as number 245 with just 82 citations, ahead of French Le Monde, but behind the Swedes’ Dagens Nyheter. Danish Information incorporates data from Wikipedia by Johannes Wehner afaik but gains only 2 citations. Politiken has some original English content, while Information has none afaik.
Finn Årup Nielsen's blog 
August 30, 2010 at 7:11 pm
Do you think editors who use the {{cite news}} template are roughly representative of all Wikipedia editors who contribute reliable sources to Wikipedia? Do you think that the domains referenced by the {{cite news}} template are roughly representative of the domains referenced by all reference citations in Wikipedia?I am not knocking your work here. Just trying to learn more about this phenomenon before writing a news piece about it.
September 2, 2010 at 10:30 am
Thanks for your Questions. Q: "Do you think that the domains referenced by the {{cite news}} template are roughly representative of the domains referenced by all reference citations in Wikipedia?"A: Certainly not. The statistics made by Ed Summers – http://inkdroid.org/journal/2010/08/25/top-hosts-referenced-in-wikipedia-part-2/ – show that, e.g., PubMed is much referenced. Summers is looking on all links. People using "cite journal" will not usually cite, e.g. BBC but rather a scientific article. Looking on Summers there is a lot science, music, sports, census, etc. sites reference. But news references with and without "cite news" are probably fairly correlated. If you look on the ranking: I got BBC, NYTimes, WP, CNN and Guardian high on the list, and so has Summers – only slightly reorder. Q: "Do you think editors who use the {{cite news}} template are roughly representative of all Wikipedia editors who contribute reliable sources to Wikipedia?"A: Hmmm… Good question. If you look apart from news source this is likely not to be the case: Editors focusing on writing science articles will reference science sources only, while news-oriented editors will cite news sources and possibly with the cite news template. The reference style of editors may be different, some will only provide a link to a news source while other editors – including me – try to use the template as much as possible. Whether there is any difference between the two editor groups I can only guess about.