The impact of research design on the half-life of the Wikipedia category system

The Wikipedia category system has shown a phenomenon of life or obsolescence similar as periodical literatures do, so this paper aims to investigate how the factors related to study design and research process, involving the observation points and the time span, play an impact on the obsolescence of the Wikipedia category system. For the impact of different observation points, we make use of the datasets at different time points under the same time span and the results show that the observation points do have an obvious influence on the category cited half-life; And for the impact of time span, we use the datasets with different intervals at the same time point and the results indicate that the time span has a certain impact on the categories´ obsolescence. Based on the deep analysis, the paper further proposes some useful suggestions for the similar studies on information obsolescence in the future.