Wasted Effort and Missed Opportunities: Content Production and Reader Interest in Wikipedia

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English Wikipedia's Main pageWikipedia’s best content is mainly where its readers aren’t. For instance, the article about weddings is seen thousands of times every day, yet the community labels it “quite incomplete”, its prose “distinctly unencyclopedic”, and a call for additional sources to verify its content has been featured prominently at the top of the article for over four years. It turns out that this is not uncommon; each month Wikipedia’s articles are viewed billions of times, and over 40% of these views are to articles that would be of significantly higher quality if the encyclopaedia’s contributors followed their readers.

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