How different are Wikipedia and web link structure?

In this paper, we investigate the difference between Wikipedia and Web link structure with respect to their value as indicators of the relevance of a page for a given topic of request. Our main findings are: First, Wikipedia link structure is similar to the Web, but more densely linked. Second, Wikipedia’s outlinks behave similar to inlinks and both are good indicators of relevance, whereas on the Web the inlinks are more important. Third, when incorporating link evidence in the retrieval model, for Wikipedia the global link evidence fails and we have to take the local context into account