With the increasing relevance of Wikipedia as a source of information for a wide variety of subjects, our community is increasingly tempted to use Wikipedia as a source for studying social phenomena or social issues of societies at large. A wide variety of sociological concerns are seemingly amenable to research using Wikipedia. In this talk, I intend to (i) discuss the opportunities as well as pitfalls when using Wikipedia for studying social science questions and (ii) give examples of specific studies that tap into Wikipedia data to understand sociological issues such as gender inequality or cultural relations. I will conclude with a number of observations about the future direction of Wikipedia research.
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