A Wikia census: motives, tools and insights

Abstract

Understanding the Wikisphere phenomenon is undoubtedly of great interest. Most of the studies focus in Wikipedia and its generalization to other wikis requires an enormous amount of work in terms of selecting and retrieving the data. To facilitate the analysis of other wikis we developed a set of tools to collect and create a census of Wikia, one of the largest and most diverse repository of wikis, which hosts more than 300,000 wikis. In this work, we carry out a preliminary quantitative analysis of the census, emphasizing on the differences between active and inactive wikis. Additionally, we provide the wiki research community with the census and the scripts employed to retrieve the data, facilitating others to reproduce or reuse it.