Publications by Tiziano Piccardi

A Large-Scale Characterization of How Readers Browse Wikipedia

Tiziano Piccardi, Robert West, Akhil Arora

Despite the importance and pervasiveness of Wikipedia as one of the largest platforms for open knowledge, surprisingly little is known about how people navigate its content when seeking information. To bridge this gap, we present the first systematic large ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2023

Wikipedia Reader Navigation: When Synthetic Data Is Enough

Tiziano Piccardi, Robert West, Akhil Arora, Alberto Garcia Duran

Every day millions of people read Wikipedia. When navigating the vast space of available topics using hyperlinks, readers describe trajectories on the article network. Understanding these navigation patterns is crucial to better serve readers' needs and ad ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2022

A large scale study of reader interactions with images on Wikipedia

Tiziano Piccardi, Daniele Rama

Wikipedia is the largest source of free encyclopedic knowledge and one of the most visited sites on the Web. To increase reader understanding of the article, Wikipedia editors add images within the text of the article's body. However, despite their widespr ...

SPRINGER2022

How We Use Wikipedia: Studying Readers' Behavior with Navigation Traces

Tiziano Piccardi

In the information age, the Web and the growing global connectivity drastically simplified our access to information. Learning and fact-checking from online resources is nowadays part of our daily routine. Studying the dynamic associated with online conten ...

EPFL2022

On the Value of Wikipedia as a Gateway to the Web

Tiziano Piccardi, Robert West

By linking to external websites, Wikipedia can act as a gateway to the Web. To date, however, little is known about the amount of traffic generated by Wikipedia's external links. We fill this gap in a detailed analysis of usage logs gathered from Wikipedia ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2021

Crosslingual Topic Modeling with WikiPDA

Tiziano Piccardi, Robert West

We present Wikipedia-based Polyglot Dirichlet Allocation (WikiPDA), a crosslingual topic model that learns to represent Wikipedia articles written in any language as distributions over a common set of language-independent topics. It leverages the fact that ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2021

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia (Part 2)

Giovanni Colavizza, Tiziano Piccardi, Robert West

Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites on the Web and a common source of information for many users. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia was not conceived as a source of original information, but as a gateway to secondary sources: according to Wikipedia's gu ...

RUSSIAN NATL PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY2020

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia. (Part 1)

Tiziano Piccardi, Robert West

Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites on the Web and a common source of information for many users. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia was not conceived as a source of original information, but as a gateway to secondary sources: according to Wikipedia's gu ...

RUSSIAN NATL PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY2020

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia

Giovanni Colavizza, Tiziano Piccardi, Robert West

Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites on the Web and a common source of information for many users. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia was not conceived as a source of original information, but as a gateway to secondary sources: according to Wikipedia's gu ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2020

Reader engagement with medical content on Wikipedia

Tiziano Piccardi

Articles on Wikipedia about health and medicine are maintained by WikiProject Medicine (WPM), and are widely used by health professionals, students and others. We have compared these articles, and reader engagement with them, to other articles on Wikipedia ...

2020

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia. (Part 3)

Tiziano Piccardi, Robert West

Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites on the Web and a common source of information for many users. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia was not conceived as a source of original information, but as a gateway to secondary sources: according to Wikipedia's gu ...

RUSSIAN NATL PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY2020

Structuring Wikipedia Articles with Section Recommendations

Michele Catasta, Tiziano Piccardi, Robert West

Sections are the building blocks of Wikipedia articles. They enhance readability and can be used as a structured entry point for creating and expanding articles. Structuring a new or already existing Wikipedia article with sections is a hard task for human ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2018

Toward a mixed-initiative QA system: from studying predictors in Stack Exchange to building a mixed-initiative tool

Tiziano Piccardi

This article envisions a new customer support solution that merges the efficiency of crowd-based Question and Answer (QA) sites with the effectiveness of traditional customer care services. QA sites use crowdsourcing to solve problems in a very efficient w ...

Academic Press Ltd- Elsevier Science Ltd2017