An Examination of the Exploration of Mars
by Renae Taylor
The Collection
In celebration of the successful landing of NASA's InSight lander on November 26, 2018, I decided to take a closer look at the Exploration of Mars [1] page on Wikipedia. I wanted learn more about the history of investigating Mars remotely via spacecraft. Additionally, I was curious to see if the revisions made on the page corresponded directly to the times of mission launches or if there was some other factor leading to revisions.
Observations
Clusters
Many pages are clustered together in seemingly obvious ways. For instance, the first cluster is a collection of various organizations, spacecraft, and general topics relating to the subject of human space exploration. Meanwhile, the sixth cluster contains various objects found in the Solar System. One notable oddity is the second to last cluster. At first look, the cluster contains pages from a wide variety of topics that seemingly have no correlation with one another. However, as I examined the cluster more closely, I saw that each topic in some way relates to exploration on Mars- whether it's a page about gravity in general or a page about former President George W. Bush, who advocated for more missions to Mars. Considering that most of the clusters comprised of the phsycial geography of Mars, I suppose this all of these topics were clustered together because they fit nowhere else.
Something that I was surprised about was just how many clusters and pages there were relating to the geography and geology on Mars. Over half of the clusters were related in some way to these topics. On further reflection, I suppose this makes sense as these features could have only been observed thanks to missions to Mars. As well, a lot of them are notable for either being considered as landing spots for future missions or as areas of interest for flybys.
Page Creation
For a lot of random pages connected to the Exploration of Mars, such as the page about latitutde, there is no obvious reason as to why a page was created or edited at a certain. However, I did found in general for pages relating specifically to Martian missions, there is a direct relationship between page creation and changes, and announcements about prominent missions to Mars. For instance, the Wikipedia page for Mars Landing was created on June 4, 2007. A month later, on August 4, NASA's Phoenix lander was launched. Around the time that Phoenix successfully landed in May 2008, there was a flurry of revisions that occurred. Ignoring revisions to provide clarity and add additional information to what was already on the page, the activity for the Mars Landing page follows this general pattern where there is renewed activity every time something happens in relation to a spacecraft bound for Mars. This pattern can be seen in other pages, such as the page for Aeolis Mons.
Centrality
Most of the pages with the highest centrality scores, around ~0.04, related to Martian geography and geology. After viewing my clusters, this didn't really surprise me. The two pages with the lowest centrality scores were bit rate and metre per hour. I did find it interesting that these pages had a lower centrality score than the page for Donald Neff but I suppose this makes sense because Neff was a historian and journalist and was linked to pages for the magazines he worked for.
Internal Links and Language Pages
The pages with the highest amount of internal links include pages for the United States, Mars, and George W. Bush. This did not surprise me in the slightest because it logically makes sense that these pages would have the most internal links. Something that I found interesting was that the page for bibcode had a relatively large number of language pages in comparison to the amount of internal links the page hosts, as well as its short length of 1543 words. Upon further inspection, I realized that bibcodes were used as identifiers used by several astronomical data systems to specify literature references, so this explained why the page was translating into so many other pages due to its importance in scholarly literature.
Conclusion
Overall, examining the data of the Exploration of Mars page was an interesting experience. For the most part, I was not too surprised by the things that I observed. For instance, the clusters for the page were logical and the subjects made sense. While I initially did not expect the amount to which Martian geography and geology would be featured on the page, this makes sense as the exploration of Mars is dependent on having a thorough understanding of these subjects in addition to increasing our knowledge of these topics. A feature that I feel is fairly unique to pages relating to the exploration of Mars, in comparison to more general Wikipedia pages, is that the creation of said pages relates directly to important events that occured around the time of creation. Many pages for various probes and landers were created around the time of either the announcement of a mission or in the days leading up to it. I thought that this was interesting because the revision history of a page can be tied back to certain real-world events and acts as a historical timeline of sorts.
References
[1] Exploration of Mars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars. Accessed: 1 December 2018.
[2] Olympus Mons: Giant Mountain of Mars. https://www.space.com/20133-olympus-mons-giant-mountain-of-mars.html. Accessed: 3 December 2018.