Wikipedia and the Portrayal of Collaborative Networks of Nineteenth-Century British Mathematicians

Collaboration is key to research but it is often hard to assess and evaluate. Understanding how collaborative networks developed in different historical periods can help shed light on how scientific advances have occurred. Most studies aiming to assess collaborative groups use coauthorship as their main statistic. This article aims to move away from studies of collaboration based on flawed co-authorship statistics and introduces a new method of assessing the portrayal of collaborative networks. The method uses computational techniques applied to Wikipedia articles about nineteenth-century British mathematicians and philosophers to identify collaborative networks. This article will briefly summarise the functionality of the software used to extract the information from Wikipedia, evaluate the approach, and look towards future use cases for this kind of analysis.