Art History on Wikipedia, a Macroscopic Observation

Abstract

How are articles about art historical actors interlinked within Wikipedia? Lead by this question, we seek an overview on the link structure of a domain specific subset of Wikipedia articles. We use an established domain-specific person name authority, the Getty Union List of Artist Names (ULAN), in order to externally identify relevant actors. Besides containing consistent biographical person data, this database also provides associative relationships between its person records, serving as a reference link structure for comparison. As a first step, we use mappings between the ULAN and English Dbpedia provided by the Virtual Internet Authority File (VIAF). This way, we are able to identify 18,002 relevant person articles. Examining the link structure between these resources reveals interesting insight about the high level structure of art historical knowledge as it is represented on Wikipedia.