There and Here: Patterns of Content Transclusion in Wikipedia

As large, collaboratively authored hypertexts such as Wikipedia grow so does the requirement both for organisational principles and methods to provide sustainable consistency and to ease the task of contributing editors. Large numbers of (potential) editors are not necessarily a suffcient bulwark against loss of coherence amongst a corpus of many discrete articles. The longitudinal task of curation may benefit from deliberate curatorial roles and techniques. A potentially beneficial technique for the development and maintenance of hypertext content at scale is hypertext transclusion, by offering controllable re-use of a canonical source. In considering issues of longitudinal support of web collaborative hypertexts, we investigated the current degree and manner of adoption of transclusion facilities by editors of Wikipedia articles. We sampled 20 million articles from ten discrete language wikis within Wikipedia to analyse behaviour both within and across the individual Wikipedia communities. We show that Wikipedia makes limited, inconsistent of use of transclusion (as at February 2016). Use is localised to subject areas, which differ between sampled languages. A limited number of patterns were observed including: Lists from transclusion, Lists of Lists, Episodic Media Listings, Tangles, Articles as Macros, and Self-Transclusion. We find little indication of deliberate structural maintenance of the hypertext.