Wikipedia:Civil engineering articles on Wikipedia

Summary

The purpose of this article is to analyze the civil engineering content on Wikipedia, and ultimately its quality, consistency, and completeness. The framework for this study is the tools Wikipedia uses to organize its content, namely the categories and to a lesser degree, the civil engineering project, itself.

WikiProjects are formed from a group of contributors who want to work together as a team to improve Wikipedia. These groups often focus on a specific topic area such as civil engineering in an international context or a specific kind of task. The English Wikipedia currently has over 2,000 WikiProjects, about 1,000 of which are monitored by 30–2,000 editors and all with varying levels of activity. Most importantly, “WikiProjects are not rule-making organizations, nor can they assert ownership of articles within a specific topic area. WikiProjects have no special rights or privileges compared to other editors and may not impose their preferences on articles.”

Projects can offer advice on developing articles as well as recommended formats by providing:

“(S)ubject-specific considerations in applying site-wide standards; links to subject-specific templates; a list of information that editors should consider including in a given type of article; relevant examples; and clear explanations (e.g., reasons why editors recommend "this" instead of "that"). Well-written WikiProject advice material also takes into account the fact that most articles are within the scope of multiple WikiProjects, and seeks to avoid conflicting advice, which can lead to unproductive "territorial" disputes between projects, and between projects and editors with WikiProject-unrelated editing concerns.”

The analysis starts first with two WikiProjects; Civil Engineering and Transport and then goes on to look at other related information items.

The Civil engineering domain on Wikipedia

In the case of the latter, it counts roughly 80,000 articles on the site with civil engineering content. As of 2018, this material gets 1.25 million page views a day, although this number is not unique visitors.

WikiProject civil engineering

The Civil Engineering project references the category of civil engineering itself on the site. The category “civil engineering” has 155 articles and 21 separate subcategories that have multiple sub-subcategories as well (2018). The project is on the English platform and covers North America, Europe, and Oceana but doesn’t include broader categories such as infrastructure. There are overlaps between the categories as well as data corruption on the reporting, but it still provides a useful analysis and a tool for promoting the project going forward.

Searches on the phrase “civil engineering” on Wikipedia

In 2017, there were 7,400 pages of civil engineering content queried with an average of 460,000 pageviews a day.

Civil Engineer Editors on Wikipedia

There are 5,400 civil engineers editing worldwide on Wikipedia, of that number; 2,700 are American engineers with only 130 of those identifying with ASCE (2018).

WikiProject transport

The category “Wikiproject:transport” has 13,600 articles and 35 separate subcategories that have multiple sub-subcategories as well. The project is on the English platform. This material also covers North America, Europe, and Oceana. This material gets 40,000 page views a day, although this number is not unique visitors and most of it is oriented towards aviation. The overlap with civil engineering may be as little as 10,000 page views.

Wikipedia category infrastructure

A significant category of Wikipedia is the Infrastructure category although there are related items in transport infrastructure. Currently, there are 36 thousand transport infrastructure articles on the English Wikipedia platform, and the traffic on these is almost half of a million page views; roughly 50% of that is US-related. This is almost a complete overlap between this category and that of the Transport category.

Traffic analysis of Civil Engineering Content

People seeking civil engineering content on Wikipedia are primarily going there seeking information on board categories of information in three areas, the largest being building and structures with environmental engineering next and transportation the third largest. Of the 1.25M page views a day for all CE content on the site, one-third of the page view traffic is for specific buildings (0.4M out of 1.25M).

• By comparison, Civil engineering historic landmarks (NCHELs) only draw 100,000-page views per day and there is probably overlap between the two categories.

The environment is important to people and the page view stats reinforce this, although the Wikistats tools couldn’t count all the pageviews in this area; the estimate is about 0.25M. The third area is more problematic due to the overlap between the subcategories for CE transportation content and transport infrastructure. Still, this content area generates an estimated 0.25M page views per day for this CE material.

The next largest area of readership is for technical knowledge areas such as fluid mechanics (0.15M), geotechnical (0.2M), structural (0.1M) surveying (0.1M). Sadly, biographies about CEs only draw roughly 4,000 page views a day, the same as that for coastal engineering; although CE biography is an area that is probably underreported.

• There are three predominant pathways through the site, namely CE biographies, CE discipline knowledge such as mechanics, surveying, structural, geotechnical, hydraulic, etc., and specific built environment items such as buildings, bridges, infrastructure, etc. The traffic analysis shows that over 75% of the pageviews go thru the last pathway.

Quality Assessment of US Civil Engineering Content on Wikipedia

An attempt to assess the quality of the CE content on Wikipedia is almost an impossible task and can only be discussed at the highest level with the broadest strokes. Take the buildings and structures category as an example there are an estimated 30,000 articles with approximately 400,000-page views. The largest numbers are in the various 19th and 20th century articles, an estimated 15,000 articles and 150,000 page views for 19th century buildings, and an estimated 10,000 articles and 200,000 page views for 20th century infrastructure.

The fundamental problem with a majority of this CE content is the inadequate recognition of the role civil engineers played in delivering the project. An example of this is the Statue of Liberty article. This article gets roughly 10,000 page views a day.

• There are seven references to engineers in the article but only one of them is to a civil engineer. There is a separate paragraph for the architecture of the pedestal design and one sentence for the design of the statue framing. There is also no link to the civil engineering article.
• The 1982 restoration section doesn’t mention any civil engineers that were part of the effort. The more detailed restoration article has been flagged for poor quality issues, mainly lack reference material. The sub-article references the key role that ASCE played in the restoration but the main article doesn’t and this is the only reference in the article to civil engineering.