Mining halal food search pathways down the Wikipedia’s rabbit hole

ABSTRACT

Wikipedia has grown to be the biggest online encyclopedia in terms of comprehensiveness, reach, and coverage. However, although different websites and social network platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit have received considerable academic attention, Wikipedia has largely gone unnoticed. This is surprising given the fact that Wikipedia is the fifth most-widely visited website. In this study, we fill this research gap by investigating halal food navigation strategies over an entire month. We use the recently released clickstream data which contains more than 25 million pairs of URLs in English language, accounting for a total of around 6-billion-page requests to the Wikipedia servers. Compared to outgoing traffic analysis, search patterns of the incoming traffic to the halal food entry reveal that readers are more prone to fall into the Wikipedia rabbit hole. Using techniques borrowed from social network analysis (SNA), our results also show that the information network of the Wikipedia halal food topics follows a small world preferential attachment pattern. This finding lends strong support to the “Matthew Effect”, which is a variation of the “rich get richer” model. Our findings hold important implications for different stakeholders as they underscore the relational nature of halal food networks and the importance of online encyclopedias as critical information tools.

KEYWORDS:

• Halal food
• Wikipedia
• clickstream
• information networks
• community detection
• topic modeling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mohamed M. Mostafa

Mohamed M. Mostafa has received a PhD in Business from the Manchester Business School, the University of Manchester, UK. He has also earned a MS in Applied Statistics from the University of Northern Colorado, USA, a MA in French Language and Civilization from Middlebury College, USA, a MA in Social Science Data Analysis from Essex University, UK, a MA in Translation Studies from Portsmouth University, UK, a MSc in Functional Neuroimaging from Brunel University, UK and a MS in Affective Neuroscience from the University of Maastricht/the University of Florence. He was employed at universities in the USA, Portugal, Egypt, Cyprus, Turkey, France, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. Currently, he works as a Full Professor at GUST, Kuwait. He has published over 90 research papers in several leading academic peer reviewed journals, including Economic Modeling, Social Indicators Research, Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, Expert Systems with Applications, Sustainable Development, International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, Social Network Analysis & Mining, International Journal of Intelligent Computing & Cybernetic among others.