Author: Andrew Robert Wai-Gon Fung

“Do not use Wikipedia. It is unreliable.” All through high school and even in the higher grades of elementary school, every time there was an assignment that involved research the teacher would constantly remind the class those unforgettable words. If it is so unreliable then why is it such a popular website?  Haven’t you always noticed that Wikipedia is always one of the top links in all searches? Its because with Google’s support, Wikipedia constantly appears whenever a search is conducted on Google Search, which has helped it to acquire over 300 million readers worldwide.  Many digital marketers use this popularity of Wikipedia to boost their clients’ businesses.  There is more to Wikipedia than just a reference source that teachers used to, and still, disapprove of.

What makes Wikipedia so desirable to digital marketers, such as ‘Legalmorning’ and ‘Colorado Digital Experts’, has to do with the concept of PageRanks as we learned in class. As of now, tens of millions of links are in-linked to Wikipedia, which in turn gives the website a very high PageRank, since we know that a page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. Because of this, many people are able to exploit Wikipedia by creating a Wiki article with an out-link to their own website. This is very useful as that website would obtain a percentage of the votes from Wikipedia, where even though that percentage is probably extremely small due to the sheer amount of out-links from Wikipedia, it would still be significant and help their website by making the link more important and likely to be included as part of Google search results.

An example of this (as described by https://blog.ispionage.com/wikipedia-affects-pagerank.html) is when “Luck of the Legion” is searched in Google, the website DanDare.org shows up and is above even Amazon in terms of PageRank.

This was because, in Wikipedia, an article about “Luck of the Legion” had a reference to a page in DanDare.org. By associating with Wikipedia, the websites that are referenced become part of top search results because of how the PageRank algorithm works, which is very interesting to me.

Its also because of this that digital marketers find that Wikipedia is very profitable for them. They can use Wiki to embed an out-link to their client’s website within new articles they can create or into pre-existing ones. By doing this, they claim that by including their clients’ link within Wikipedia, it can help to improve their clients’ PageRanks, which is likely to be true. 

It would be great for digital marketers or any companies wishing to improve their exposures to help increase their businesses to just link with Wikipedia, but it may not be that simple.  Wikipedia had implemented a no-follow policy for certain links to help discourage the website from being used by people to market their products. Yet, even these links that have the no-follow tags to them still have some importance during a search though not as much as the do-follow links.  There are also rules and certain standards that a Wikipedia article must uphold to which makes it even harder to be linked with the website.  There are companies offering to create Wikipedia articles for clients by promoting Wikipedia’s ability to increase their PageRanks.

In my opinion, even if a Wikipedia article was perfectly written and had all the needed out-links embedded within it, it doesn’t necessarily mean there will be an improvement in business.  Considering there must be millions of Wikipedia articles on the internet, then the chances of having a particular article showing up in the results especially on the first page are pretty slim.  If the article is hardly accessed then the PageRank for the backlinks may not increase. Yet, Wikipedia appears to still be a popular site by which digital marketers can increase the PageRanks of out-links and thus promote their clients’ websites.

As an aside, even giant companies, such as YouTube and Facebook, plan to associate with Wikipedia, which implies that these big businesses consider the website to be reliable.  They want their users to have a reference source to access in order to verify any content that they encounter on their sites.  

Relevant Links

• https://blog.ispionage.com/wikipedia-affects-pagerank.html
  
• https://medium.com/@coloradodigitalexperts/wikipedia-seo-strategies-how-wiki-links-affect-your-google-ranking-2fb0d2e034ad
  
• https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedia-google-youtube-facebook-support

Reference List

Colorado Digital. (2019, July 2). Wikipedia SEO Strategies: How Wiki Links Affect Your Google Ranking? Retrieved November 7, 2019, from https://medium.com/@coloradodigitalexperts/wikipedia-seo-strategies-how-wiki-links-affect-your-google-ranking-2fb0d2e034ad.

Maher, K. (2018, June 15). Facebook and Google must do more to support Wikipedia. Retrieved November 7, 2019, from https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedia-google-youtube-facebook-support.

Wood, M. (n.d.). Pro SEO Tip: How WikiPedia Can Affect Your PageRank Score. Retrieved November 7, 2019, from https://blog.ispionage.com/wikipedia-affects-pagerank.html.

Who knew that growing up and making friends and becoming who we are was not totally a random process. Was it possible that all our choices of the people we hang out with or not hang out with were based on homophily, a tendency in people to connect with others similar to themselves? As a child, I do not remember choosing friends based on their similar interests to me, but on how nice they were. So when did homophily start to affect my choices for friends or those who would remain as acquaintances or even strangers?

According to class lectures, homophily does not produce random uniform connections and is present if there are fewer connections between traits than those that are found if the connections were random. Connections between people may be built and developed based on their similar interests, but connections must also be formed as well as not formed based on other factors. As homophily is responsible for connecting people of similar interests it can also be responsible for the segregation that exists in today’s society. Whether it is segregation based on gender, cultural, social status, or one of the many types that people may have experienced, homophily may have played a part in it.

According to the scientific report “Structural transition in social networks: The role of homophily”, one of the aims of the paper was to show that segregation was due to homophily.  The report mentioned that human traits can remain rigid as well can also evolve. The authors of the study chose to keep the human traits rigid to show that social ties affecting homophily are responsible for the segregation that exists.  The report is very scientific with equations and graphs, but I shall mainly discuss the results that are of interest. The report mentioned that although humans have many traits, there are not really any particular traits that are important, that stands out when creating ties. The authors propose that the overlapping of communities of traits is a more realistic model of how society functions. Also that this connection of traits between nodes can become enhanced when the authors took into consideration the mechanism of local attachments, where there is an attachment emotionally by a person to a place.  They also state that homophily and local attachment when combine together shows an increase in segregation.

According to the study, these egocentric networks showed that as in segregation as seen in figure (a) the nodes tend to connect to similar nodes with nearly identical traits with no connection to other communities. When there is a slight connection about 5% between the communities a pattern as shown in figure (b) is seen where communities are still clustered together. In figure (c), it can be seen that as the communities overlap, the nodes become less like their neighbouring nodes as compared to figure (a) where they were similar.  In figure (d), as the features from different communities become more overlapped, the similarities between features of neighbouring nodes decrease. The study also mentioned that a decrease in the similarity of neighbouring features is also due to an increase in the ego’s diversity which is an important feature for a decrease in segregation.

If according to this study, homophily and local attachments together can increase segregation then according to the egocentric networks above it is possible to decrease it.  It is likely that there are some people who would like to make more friends outside of their comfort zones. According to the study, the authors implied that to prevent the effect of segregation in our society people should support and promote cultural diversity.  The report did not mention how to promote cultural diversity, but for me who is now aware of homophily’s existence and living in a country that embraces cultural diversity, I believe that cultural segregation can be tackled.

Learning about and participating in the languages and activities of the different cultures can increase the number of connections between nodes of a variety of traits thus decreasing some evidence of homophily and thus cultural segregation.

Relevent Link

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-40990-z

Reference List

Murase, Y., Jo, H.-H., Török, J., Kertész, J., & Kaski, K. (2019, March 13). Structural transition in social networks: The role of homophily. Retrieved October 4, 2019, from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-40990-z.