Visual Analysis of Controversy in User-generated Encyclopedias

  • Authors:

  • Ulrik Brandes;Jurgen Lerner

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer&Information Science, University of Konstanz. e-mail: Ulrik.Brandes@uni-konstanz.de;Department of Computer&Information Science, University of Konstanz. e-mail: lerner@inf.uni-konstanz.de

  • Venue:
  • VAST '07 Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology
  • Year:
  • 2007

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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.