The aim of this seminar is to introduce Wikipedia data for social science research.
Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia entirely written and edited through user
contributions. It became the world's largest "collective intelligence" experiment. Most part
of Wikipedia data, such as edit history of articles and activities of editors, is freely open to
the public and has great potential to answer social science questions. The seminar starts
with introducing recent studies using Wikipedia data. After discussing research questions
and analytic strategies using Wikipedia data, students will learn how to obtain and wrangle
the data for analysis. The seminar also provides a demonstration of basic analysis using
the data. As for programming languages, we use Python for connecting the Wikipedia APIs
to obtain the data and R for analysis. The seminar provides basic Python programming,
which covers the skill required for the course. R refresher can be offered upon request
from students. The course is held in English. However, students can write a final paper
either in English or German.