Which Twitter User Receives The Most Citations on Wikipedia?

I few days ago, I was somewhat surprised to find that one of my Tweets had been used as a citation in Wikipedia!

I began to wonder - how often are Tweets used in citations?

It's possible to search for your own Tweets using this (somewhat obscure) link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALinkSearch&target=twitter.com%2Fedent

Just edit the end of it to see if you, or your friends, have been cited. Note - the username is case sensitive, so "Edent" isn't the same as "edent".

For example, we can see where Cory Doctorow is cited:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALinkSearch&target=twitter.com%2Fdoctorow

Aha! The page on the New Zealand Internet Blackout references:

Success! I'm blacked out in solidarity with Kiwis whose net has been pwned by American entertainment giants: http://creativefreedom.org.nz/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic (@doctorow) February 19, 2009

Ok, so which Twitter user has been cited the most? TO THE API, ROBIN!

Wikipedia's own help pages are a little lacking, so I went to the help pages of the software which runs Wikipedia - MediaWiki.

We want to search for external URLs which point to Twitter and have a namespace of 0 (that means they're articles, not talk pages). We can grab a maximum of 500 results at a time, using JSON, and we want to include "www.twitter.com" and "twitter.com". Here's what we use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?
action=query&
list=exturlusage&
eunamespace=0&
eulimit=500&
format=json&
euquery=*.twitter.com

Run it yourself to see the results.

Limitations

• This only gets 500 results at a time - to paginate through, we add euoffset=
• This only searches the English Wikipedia.
• There are roughly 17,800 links to Twitter from English Wikipedia returned by the API.
• The majority of citations just point to a Twitter user's page - not to a specific Tweet.
• Some of the returned Tweets use the obsolete HashBang URls (e.g. http://twitter.com/#!/007/status/133679555167784960.)
• Some Tweets have been deleted.

Crappy Python!

import urllib2
import json
from collections import Counter

#euoffset=17800
api = "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&eunamespace=0&eulimit=500&format=json&list=exturlusage&euquery=*.twitter.com"

euoffset = 0

words = []

while euoffset < 17500:
    try:
        site_data = json.load(urllib2.urlopen(api + "&euoffset=" + str(euoffset)))
        #   Itterate through
        for element in site_data['query']['exturlusage']:
            #   Remove HashBangs #!
            #   Lowercase everything
            twitterURL = element['url'].replace("/#!","").lower()
            twitterUser = twitterURL.replace("http://twitter.com/","")
            twitterUser = twitterUser.replace("https://twitter.com/","")
            twitterUser = twitterUser.replace("@","")
            slash = twitterUser.find("/")
            if slash > 0:
                twitterUser = twitterUser[:slash]
            print twitterURL
            # print twitterUser
            words.append(twitterUser)
    except urllib2.URLError:
        print "Unable to retreive data"
        sys.exit()
    euoffset += 500

#   Most cited user
word_counts = Counter(words)
print word_counts

The Results...

The most cited Twitter users are...

1. LaLiga A Spanish Football competition - 105
2. Lea Michele An American singer / TV actor - 54
3. Guldbaggen The Swedish equivalent of the Oscars - 35
4. Kevin Tancharoen An American movie director - 12
5. PRESTO card Ottawa's public transit smartcard - 10
6. ICE T An American rapper - 10
7. Northern Pride RLFC A British rugby team - 10
8. 穴井勇輝（勇吹輝） A Japanese Actor - 9
9. NICKI MINAJ An American singer - 8
10. Counting Crows An American band - 8

And the most cited individual Tweet?

https://twitter.com/SyfyPR/status/313791237121507329

Linked to from lots of Lost Girl pages.

What Have We Learned Today?

Wikipedia does have a large amount of pop-culture (do we need hundreds of words on My Little Pony Characters?)

Twitter, unsurprisingly, has limited utility as an encyclopædic source - it's great for breaking news and ephemeral events, but it's fragile and lacks depth. There are very few occasions where Twitter would be the sole, and canonical, source of information [Citation needed].