Science Fiction and Fantasy in Wikipedia: Exploring Structural and Semantic Cues
2026-02-27 • Information Retrieval
Information RetrievalDigital Libraries
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied how to find Wikipedia articles about science fiction and fantasy, which is hard because these genres often mix together. They looked beyond just the text and used Wikipedia's extra information like categories, links between articles, and data from Wikidata. However, these signals can be influenced by how Wikipedia users organize content, so the authors explored which features are best for identifying science fiction and fantasy topics. Their work focuses on understanding the structure and meaning of Wikipedia pages to improve this identification.
Wikipedia categorieswikilinksWikidatascience fictionfantasygenre boundariessemantic featuresstructural featuresmachine-readable data
Authors
Włodzimierz Lewoniewski, Milena Stróżyna, Izabela Czumałowska, Elżbieta Lewańska
Abstract
Identifying which Wikipedia articles are related to science fiction, fantasy, or their hybrids is challenging because genre boundaries are porous and frequently overlap. Wikipedia nonetheless offers machine-readable structure beyond text, including categories, internal links (wikilinks), and statements if corresponding Wikidata items. However, each of these signals reflects community conventions and can be biased or incomplete. This study examines structural and semantic features of Wikipedia articles that can be used to identify content related to science fiction and fantasy (SF/F).