UC Irvine

Species are often targeted for conservation based on their “charisma”. A comprehensive, quantitative metric for species charisma could improve conservation efforts and help ensure that even low-charisma species are protected. We investigated whether metrics based on Wikipedia (species article length, links to and from each species page, and Google’s PageRank) could be used to assess the charisma of endangered species, evaluated using prior work on species charisma (Albert et al. 2018). We evaluated three Wikipedia-based metrics based on their ability to assess endangered species charisma. We found highly significant correlations for all three metrics, with article length the most significant (rpb=0.57; p < .00001**).