Excavating the mother lode of human-generated text: A systematic review of research that uses the wikipedia corpus

•Wikipedia provides rich, natural semi-structured texts for information retrieval.•It provides semantic information for keyword extraction from varied texts.•It facilitates clustering, text classification and semantic relatedness analyses.•It supplies a semantically structured knowledge base for studying ontologies. Although primarily an encyclopedia, Wikipedia’s expansive content provides a knowledge base that has been continuously exploited by researchers in a wide variety of domains. This article systematically reviews the scholarly studies that have used Wikipedia as a data source, and investigates the means by which Wikipedia has been employed in three main computer science research areas: information retrieval, natural language processing, and ontology building. We report and discuss the research trends of the identified and examined studies. We further identify and classify a list of tools that can be used to extract data from Wikipedia, and compile a list of currently available data sets extracted from Wikipedia.