Factors Affecting Wikipedia Notability of Filipino Athletes

A Study on Education and Geographic Inequality

Abstract

As the Philippines celebrates its 100th year of participation in international sporting events, this paper utilized the Wikipedia pages of Filipino athletes and looked into how the presence or absence of quality education and geographic inequalities affect the notability of Filipino sports personalities. The authors hypothesized that certain terms co-occur frequently in the descriptions and infoboxes of notable Filipino athletes, and that terms related to popular sports, urbanized areas, and prestigious educational institutions have higher centrality in the network. Information from the Wikipedia pages were web scraped using Python, while the article title, infobox, and description of the entries were harvested using BeautifulSoup and Wikipedia API. Through the pre-processed, extracted noun phrases, a co-occurrence network was built and imported to Gephi, and was visualized via Force Atlas 2 algorithm. The results suggest that there are three major network clusters from the data obtained: (1) Olympians, regional, and local athletes; (2) mainstream, collegiate, and professional sports, and (3) boxing and combat sports. Through this research, the authors hope to fill the gap in local literature on sports education and geographic inequalities in the country. The researchers also formulated policy recommendations for the Philippine Sports Commission to address factors affecting notability of Filipino athletes.