Visual analysis of controversy in user-generated encyclopedias

  • Authors:
  • Ulrik Brandes;Jürgen Lerner

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer & Information Science, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany;Department of Computer & Information Science, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Information Visualization - Special issue on visual analytics science and technology
  • Year:
  • 2008

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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.