Visual Analysis of Controversy in User-generated Encyclopedias

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.

[1]  Simone Paolo Ponzetto,et al.  WikiRelate! Computing Semantic Relatedness Using Wikipedia , 2006, AAAI.

[2]  Kamal Nigam,et al.  Towards a Robust Metric of Opinion , 2004 .

[3]  Aniket Kittur,et al.  He says, she says: conflict and coordination in Wikipedia , 2007, CHI.

[4]  Gene H. Golub,et al.  Matrix computations , 1983 .

[5]  Santosh S. Vempala,et al.  On clusterings: Good, bad and spectral , 2004, JACM.

[6]  Bing Liu,et al.  Opinion observer: analyzing and comparing opinions on the Web , 2005, WWW '05.

[7]  Evgeniy Gabrilovich,et al.  Overcoming the Brittleness Bottleneck using Wikipedia: Enhancing Text Categorization with Encyclopedic Knowledge , 2006, AAAI.

[8]  R. Rosecrance.  Bipolarity, multipolarity, and the future , 1966 .

[9]  Ulrik Brandes,et al.  Summarizing Dynamic Bipolar Conflict Structures , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[10]  Hermann A. Maurer,et al.  The Transformation of the Web: How Emerging Communities Shape the Information we Consume , 2006, J. Univers. Comput. Sci..

[11]  Les Gasser,et al.  Assessing Information Quality of a Community-Based Encyclopedia , 2005, ICIQ.

[12]  J. Giles.  Internet encyclopaedias go head to head , 2005, Nature.

[13]  Aniket Kittur,et al.  Us vs. Them: Understanding Social Dynamics in Wikipedia with Revert Graph Visualizations , 2007, 2007 IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology.

[14]  Martin Wattenberg,et al.  Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences- 2007 Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia , 2022 .

[15]  M. V. Valkenburg.  Network Analysis , 1964 .

[16]  Matthew Hurst,et al.  Deriving marketing intelligence from online discussion , 2005, KDD '05.

[17]  Frank McSherry,et al.  Spectral partitioning of random graphs , 2001, Proceedings 2001 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing.

[18]  Chaomei Chen,et al.  Visual Analysis of Conflicting Opinions , 2006, 2006 IEEE Symposium On Visual Analytics Science And Technology.

[19]  Katy Börner,et al.  Analyzing and visualizing the semantic coverage of Wikipedia and its authors , 2005, Complex..

[20]  Martin Wattenberg,et al.  Studying cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations , 2004, CHI.

[21]  Ramakrishnan Srikant,et al.  Mining newsgroups using networks arising from social behavior , 2003, WWW '03.

[22]  P. Ingwersen,et al.  Proceedings of ISSI 2005 – The 10th International Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics: Stockholm, Sweden, July 24-28, 2005 , 2005 .