A Platform for Visually Exploring the Development of Wikipedia Articles (original) (raw)

Towards Better Visual Tools for Exploring Wikipedia Article Development – The Use Case of " Gamergate Controversy "

We present a comparative analysis of three tools for visually exploring the revision history of a Wikipedia article. We do so on the use case of " Gamergate Controversy " , an article that has been the setting of a major editor dispute in the last half of 2014 and early 2015, resulting in multiple editor bans and gathering news media attention. We show how our tools can be used to visually explore editor disagreement interactions and networks, as well as conflicted content and provenance, and present some of the results. We argue that these individual tools could benefit from synergies by combining them and lay out a possible architecture for doing so.

iChase: Supporting exploration and awareness of editing activities on wikipedia

2010

Abstract To increase its credibility and preserve the trust of its readers. Wikipedia needs to ensure a good quality of its articles. To that end, it is critical for Wikipedia administrators to be aware of contributors' editing activity to monitor vandalism, encourage reliable contributors to work on specific articles, or find mentors for new contributors. In this paper, we present iChase, a novel interactive visualization tool to provide administrators with better awareness of editing activities on Wikipedia.

Contropedia - the analysis and visualization of controversies in Wikipedia articles

Proceedings of The International Symposium on Open Collaboration - OpenSym '14, 2014

Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where di↵erent points of view lead to conflict. In Wikipedia, one of the most prominent examples of collaboration online, conflict is mediated by both policy and software, and conflicts often reflect larger societal debates.

Wikipedia Revision Toolkit: Efficiently Accessing Wikipedia's Edit History

… of the 49th Annual Meeting of the …, 2011

We present an open-source toolkit which allows (i) to reconstruct past states of Wikipedia, and (ii) to efficiently access the edit history of Wikipedia articles. Reconstructing past states of Wikipedia is a prerequisite for reproducing previous experimental work based on Wikipedia. Beyond that, the edit history of Wikipedia articles has been shown to be a valuable knowledge source for NLP, but access is severely impeded by the lack of efficient tools for managing the huge amount of provided data. By using a dedicated storage format, our toolkit massively decreases the data volume to less than 2% of the original size, and at the same time provides an easy-to-use interface to access the revision data. The language-independent design allows to process any language represented in Wikipedia. We expect this work to consolidate NLP research using Wikipedia in general, and to foster research making use of the knowledge encoded in Wikipedia's edit history.

Collaborative Visualizations for Wikipedia Critique and Activism

Wikipedia is one of the largest platforms based on the concept of asynchronous, distributed, collaborative work. A systematic collaborative exploration and assessment of Wik-ipedia content and coverage is however still largely missing. On the one hand editors routinely perform quality and coverage control of individual articles, while on the other hand academic research on Wikipedia is mostly focused on global issues, and only sporadically on local assessment. In this paper, we argue that collaborative visualizations have the potential to fill this gap, affording editors to collaboratively explore and analyse patterns in Wikipedia content, at different scales. We illustrate how a collaborative visualization service can be an effective tool for editors to create, edit, and discuss public visualizations of Wikipedia data. Combined with the large Wikipedia user-base, and its diverse local knowledge, this could result in a large-scale collection of evidence for critique and activism, and the potential to enhance the quantity and quality of Wikipedia content.

Wikipedia Customization through Web Augmentation Techniques

2012

Wikipedia is a successful example of collaborative knowledge construction. This can be synergistically complemented with personal knowledge construction whereby individuals are supported in their sharing, experimenting and building of information in a more private setting, without the scrutiny of the whole community. Ideally, both approaches should be seamlessly integrated so that wikipedians can easily transit from the public sphere to the private sphere, and vice versa. To this end, we introduce WikiLayer, a plugin for Wikipedia that permits wikipedians locally supplement Wikipedia articles with their own content (i.e. a layer ). Layering additional content is achieved locally by seamlessly interspersing Wikipedia content with custom content. WikiLayer is driven by three main wiki principles: affordability (i.e., if you know how to edit articles, you know how to layer), organic growth (i.e., layers evolve in synchrony with the underlying articles) and shareability (i.e., layers can be shared in confidence through the wikipedian's social network, e.g., Facebook ). The paper provides motivating scenarios for readers, contributors and editors. WikiLayer is available for download at http: //webaugmentation.org/wikilayer.xpi.

Visualizing Activity on Wikipedia with Chromograms

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007

To investigate how participants in peer production systems allocate their time, we examine editing activity on Wikipedia, the well-known online encyclopedia. To analyze the huge edit histories of the site's administrators we introduce a visualization technique, the chromogram, that can display very long textual sequences through a simple color coding scheme. Using chromograms we describe a set of characteristic editing patterns. In addition to confirming known patterns, such reacting to vandalism events, we identify a distinct class of organized systematic activities. We discuss how both reactive and systematic strategies shed light on self-allocation of effort in Wikipedia, and how they may pertain to other peer-production systems.

Finding Structure in Wikipedia Edit Activity

Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web - WWW '16 Companion

This paper documents a study of the real-time Wikipedia edit stream containing over 6 million edits on 1.5 million English Wikipedia articles, during 2015. We focus on answering questions related to identification and use of information cascades between Wikipedia articles, based on author editing activity. Our findings show that by constructing information cascades between Wikipedia articles using editing activity, we are able to construct an alternative linking structure in comparison to the embedded links within a Wikipedia page. This alternative article hyperlink structure was found to be relevant in topic, and timely in relation to external global events (e.g., political activity). Based on our analysis, we contextualise the findings against areas of interest such as events detection, vandalism, edit wars, and editing behaviour.