Cover not available
Part of
Investigating Wikipedia: Linguistic corpus building, exploration and analysis
Edited by Céline Poudat, Harald Lüngen and Laura Herzberg
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 121] 2024
► pp. 156–177

Chapter 6
Exploring the evolution of Wikipedia articles through Contropedia

| Eurecat — Technology Centre of Catalonia
| Politecnico di Milano
| University of Amsterdam
Wikipedia is not just a corpus of encyclopedic articles; it also includes an entire edit history that details the evolution of each article. However, such records are often unknown to the general public, and too complex for researchers to use. Contropedia uses innovative techniques to allow for the visualization, exploration and investigation of the evolution of Wikipedia articles and disputes about their content. This chapter introduces Contropedia and provides an in-depth analysis of two articles from the WikiDemoCorpus: the English language article ‘Chiropractic’ and a multilingual comparison of articles on the European migration crisis. These use cases illustrate Contropedia’s visual and analytical modules for analyzing controversies within an article and for cross-cultural comparison.
Keywords: Wikipedia revision histories, article evolution, data visualization, controversy mapping, Contropedia
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Description of Contropedia
    • 2.1Related work
    • 2.2Tool rationale and method
    • 2.3Interface description
      • 2.3.1Layer view
      • 2.3.2Dashboard view
      • 2.3.3Detailed view
  • 3.Cross-language comparison
    • 3.1Case study: European migrant crisis
      • 3.1.1Comparing the overall activity using the “layer view”
      • 3.1.2Identifying the most controversial shared elements using the “dashboard view”
      • 3.1.3Comparing the evolution of controversial elements using the “detailed view”
      • 3.1.4Analyzing language-specific controversial elements using the “detailed view”
    • 3.2Discussion
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 31 October 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.121.06lan
References (32)
References
Adafre, Sisay F. & de Rijke, Maarten. 2005. Discovering missing links in Wikipedia. Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Link Discovery — LinkKDD ’05, 90–97. New York NY: ACM. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Adler, B. Thomas & de Alfaro, Luca. 2007. A content-driven reputation system for Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on World Wide Web — WWW ’07, Banff, Alberta, 8–12 May, 261. New York NY: ACM. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Adler, B. Thomas, de Alfaro, Luca, Pye, Ian & Raman, Vishwanath. 2008. Measuring author contributions to the Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Wikis, September, 1–10. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bao, Patti, Hecht, Brent, Carton, Samuel, Quaderi, Mahmood, Horn, Michael & Gergle, Darren. 2012. Omnipedia: Bridging the wikipedia language gap. In CHI’12: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1075–1084. New York NY: ACM. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Borra, Eric, Weltevrede, Esther, Ciuccarelli, Paolo, Kaltenbrunner, Andreas, Laniado, David, Magni, Giovanni, Mauri, Michele, Rogers, Richard & Venturini, Tommaso. 2015. Societal controversies in Wikipedia articles. In CHI’15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 193–196. New York NY: ACM. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2014. Contropedia — The analysis and visualization of controversies in Wikipedia articles. OpenSym 34(1). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brandes, Ulrik & Lerner, Jürgen. 2008. Visual analysis of controversy in user-generated encyclopedias. Information Visualization 7(1): 34–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Consonni, Cristian, Laniado, David & Montresor, Alberto. 2019. WikiLinkGraphs: A complete, longitudinal and multi-language dataset of the Wikipedia link networks. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 13(1): 598–607. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2020. CycleRank, or there and back again: Personalized relevance scores from cyclic paths on directed graphs. Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 476: 20190740. Proc. R. Soc. A.47620190740. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ekstrand, Michael D. & Riedl, John T. 2009. rv you’re dumb: Identifying discarded work in Wiki article history. In Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, article 4, 1–10. Orlando FL. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Flöck, Fabian & Acosta, Maribel. 2015. Whovis: Visualizing editor interactions and dynamics in collaborative writing over time. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web, Florence, Italy, 191–194. New York NY: ACM. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Flöck, Fabian, Laniado, David, Stadthaus, Felix & Acosta, Maribel. 2015. Towards better visual tools for exploring Wikipedia article development — The use case of “Gamergate Controversy”. Ninth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 9(5): 48–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Forte, Andrea, Larco, Vanesa & Bruckman, Amy. 2009. Decentralization in Wikipedia governance. Journal of Management Information Systems 26(1): 49–72. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Geiger, R. Stuart & Halfaker, Aaron. 2016. Open algorithmic systems: Lessons on opening the black box from Wikipedia. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research 6. 〈[URL]〉 (1 June 2024).
Gredel, Eva. 2017. Digital discourse analysis and Wikipedia: Bridging the gap between Foucauldian discourse analysis and digital conversation analysis. Journal of Pragmatics 115: 99–114. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hecht, Brent & Gergle, Darren. 2009. Measuring self-focus bias in community-maintained knowledge repositories. In C&T ’09: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Communities and Technologies, 11–20. New York NY: ACM. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heer, Jeffrey, Bostock, Michael & Ogievetsky, Vadim. 2010. A tour through the visualization zoo. Communications of the ACM 53(6): 59–67. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kaltenbrunner, Andreas & Laniado, David. 2012. There is no deadline: Time evolution of Wikipedia discussions. In WikiSym ’12: Proceedings of the Eighth Annual International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, article 6, 1–10. New York NY: ACM. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kittur, Aniket, Suh, Bongwon, Pendleton, Bryan A. & Chi, Ed H. 2007. He says, she says: conflict and coordination in Wikipedia. In CHI ’07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 453–462. New York NY: ACM. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Laniado, David, Tasso, Riccardo, Volkovich, Yana & Kaltenbrunner, Andreas. 2011. When the Wikipedians talk: Network and tree structure of Wikipedia discussion pages. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM-11) 5(1): 177–184. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Laniado, David, Borra, Eric, Mauri, Michele, Kaltenbrunner, Andreas, Weltevrede, Esther, Ciucarelli, Paolo, Magni, Giovanni, Rogers, Richard & Venturini, Tommaso. 2015. D4. 2 Description of the Contropedia platform. 〈[URL]〉 (1 June 2024).
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mesgari, Mostafa, Okoli, Chitu, Mehdi, Mohamad, Nielsen, Finn Å. & Lanamäki, Arto. 2015. “The sum of all human knowledge”: A systematic review of scholarly research on the content of Wikipedia. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 66(2): 219–245. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pentzold, Christian, Weltevrede, Esther, Mauri, Michele, Laniado, David, Kaltenbrunner, Andreas & Borra, Eric. 2017. Digging wikipedia: The online encyclopedia as a digital cultural heritage gateway and site. Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH) 10(1): 1–19. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rad, Hoda S. & Barbosa, Denilson. 2012. Identifying controversial articles in Wikipedia: A comparative study. In WikiSym ’12: Proceedings of the Eighth Annual International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, article 7, 1–10. New York NY: ACM. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rogers, Richard. 2013. Digital Methods. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2019. Doing digital methods. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Rogers, Richard & Sendijarevic, Emina. 2012. Neutral or national point of view? A comparison of Srebrenica articles across Wikipedia’s language versions. Proc. Wikipedia Academy. 〈[URL]〉 (1 June 2024).
Viégas, Fernanda B., Wattenberg, Martin & Dave, Kushal. 2004. Studying cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations. In CHI ’04: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 575–582. New York NY: ACM. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weltevrede, Esther & Borra, Eric. 2016. Platform affordances and data practices: The value of dispute on Wikipedia. Big Data & Society. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yasseri, Taha, Spoerri, Anselm, Graham, Mark & Kertész, János. 2014. The most controversial topics in Wikipedia. In Global Wikipedia: International and Cross-cultural Issues in Online Collaboration, Pnina Fichman & Noriko Hara (eds), 1–6. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Zhu, Haiyi, Yu, Bowen, Halfaker, Aaron & Terveen, Loren. 2018. Value-sensitive algorithm design: Method, case study, and lessons. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2 (CSCW), 1–23. New York NY: ACM. DOI logoGoogle Scholar