TWikiL – the Twitter Wikipedia Link Dataset

Abstract

Recent research has shown how strongly Wikipedia and other web services or platforms are connected. For example, search engines rely heavily on surfacing Wikipedia links to satisfy their users' information needs and volunteer-created Wikipedia content frequently gets re-used on other social media platforms like Reddit. However, publicly accessible datasets that enable researchers to study the interrelationship between Wikipedia and other platforms are sparse. In addition to that, most studies only focus on certain points in time and don't consider the historical perspective. To begin solving these problems we developed TWikiL, the Twitter Wikipedia Link Dataset, which contains all Wikipedia links posted on Twitter in the period 2006 to January 2021. We extract Wikipedia links from Tweets and enrich the referenced articles with their respective Wikidata identifiers and Wikipedia topic categories, which will make this dataset immediately useful for a large range of scholarly use cases. In this paper, we describe the data collection process, perform an initial exploratory analysis and present a comprehensive overview of how this dataset can be useful for the research community.