Visual Analysis of Controversy in User-generated Encyclopedias

Abstract

Wikipedia is a large and rapidly growing Web-based collaborative authoring environment, where anyone on the Internet can create, modify, and delete pages about encyclopedic topics. A remarkable property of some Wikipedia pages is that they are written by up to thousands of authors who may have contradicting opinions. In this paper, we show that a visual analysis of the 'who revises whom'-network gives deep insight into controversies. We propose a set of analysis and visualization techniques that reveal the dominant authors of a page, the roles they play, and the alters they confront. Thereby we provide tools to understand how Wikipedia authors collaborate in the presence of controversy.

Using text animated transitions to support navigation in document histories

“…As far as we know, the only tools that use animations to convey document edits are Wikipedia Animate and AniWiki 4 . Both show Wikipedia article revisions in sequence like a slideshow.…”

“…Although analytic methods have been proposed to detect controversies [4], we adopt a simpler approach. We compute a subset of the revision history based on the shortest edit path between the first and last revisions, and use it to display "edit shortcuts" underneath the history (Fig.…”

A Brief Review of Studies of Wikipedia in Peer-Reviewed Journals

“…Brandes and Lerner [12] specifically examined the historical progress of edit wars, where controversies lead to mutual revisions of contributions. They presented visual analysis tools to study the progress of such conflicts.…”

“…Brandes and Lerner [12] produced a visual analysis of edit wars, when contributors with opposing points of view repeatedly revise each other's entries. Nikolaos et al [48] investigated the development of quality articles in Wikipedia by using social network analysis to determine the authoritativeness of articles.…”

Démographie des communautés en ligne. Le cas des wikis

“…Outre le fait qu'ils se soient essentiellement intéressésà la Wikipedia, les travaux quantitatifs précédents menés sur les wikis ont en effet principalement viséà examiner la topologie des réseaux d'interaction ou des liens hypertextes sousjacents [Capocci et al, 2006;Zlatic et al, 2006], ou bien encore la structure du contenu au niveau des articles [Brandes & Lerner, 2008;Wilkinson & Huberman, 2007], en délaissant fréquemment les déterminants de la dynamique démographique elle-même (à l'exception de Kittur et al [2006] qui compare la démographie des contributeurs réguliers vs. occasionnels sur la Wikipedia). Dans les sections suivantes, nous analysons l'évolution de notreéchantillon de wikis en montrant de quelle manière certains indicateurs sont corrélés avec différents modes de croissance ; il s'agit en soi d'uneétape préliminaire pour comprendre plus globalement les facteurs sous-tendant certains motifs d'évolution dans la wikisphère.…”