Key Recommendations for Infoboxes in Wikipedia

Wikipedia infoboxes represent the semistructured part of data inside a Wikipedia article. The creation of infoboxes is based on the use of templates, which provide the user with a predefined amount of keys. These keys are mainly mandatory and have to be specified in the corresponding infobox along with the corresponding values. This imposes significant limits on the user’s actions. We analyzed the development of infoboxes from about 50,000 articles. Furthermore, the templates themselves were analyzed, focusing on ambiguity and multiple usage of keys. Based on these results we introduce a prototype for infobox creation called SnoopBox, which is based on a key recommendation system. This system supports the user creating infoboxes and avoids the tricky use of templates. Both the results of the evaluation of this program and the analysis of infoboxes in Wikipedia are presented.