What's on Wikipedia, and What's Not ... ? Assessing Completeness of Information

The World Wide Web continues to grow closer to achieving the vision of becoming the repository of all human knowledge, as features and applications that support user-generated content become more prevalent. Wikipedia is fast becoming an important resource for news and information. It is an online information source that is increasingly used as the first, and sometimes only, stop for online encyclopedic information. Using a method employed by Tankard and Royal to judge completeness of Web content, completeness of information on Wikipedia is assessed. Some topics are covered more comprehensively than others, and the predictors of these biases include recency, importance, population, and financial wealth. Wikipedia is more a socially produced document than a value-free information source. It reflects the viewpoints, interests, and emphases of the people who use it.