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Investigating Wikipedia: Linguistic corpus building, exploration and analysis
Edited by Céline Poudat, Harald Lüngen and Laura Herzberg
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 121] 2024
► pp. 178–204

Chapter 7
Live exploration of Wikipedia editing dynamics with visual analytics

WhoColor and Interactive Wikipedia Article Analysis Notebooks

| Independent Researcher
| GESIS — Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, University of Konstanz
| Technical University of Munich
The revision histories of Wikipedia articles are a rich source of data about the interactions of editors with each other and with the content, yet they are not straightforward to mine or understand. We describe two tools for visual analytics that support this effort: (i) An interactive browser extension to study word authorship, age, and conflict dynamics, which provides an overlay on live Wikipedia articles; and (ii) a novel interactive Jupyter Notebook package that allows us to run analyses of editorial dynamics out-of-the-box and is easily modifiable. Both leverage live data for any article on demand from several Web APIs, centering on our own WikiWho service, providing the most accurate mining of live word-level changes currently available. We show how these tools enable the exploration of the survival of content, productivity of editors, conflict dynamics, and other metrics through low-barrier interfaces while providing the opportunity for more quantitative investigations via access to the notebooks’ underlying data structures.
Keywords: Wikipedia revision history, visual analytics, WikiWho, IWAAN
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Related work
    • 1.2What is in this chapter?
  • 2.Analyzing articles “in situ”: WhoColor
  • 3.IWAAN: Visual analytics with Jupyter Notebooks in the cloud
    • 3.1Jupyter Notebooks as a versatile analysis, sharing and documentation tool
    • 3.2IWAAN content structure
  • 4.Use case: “Genetically modified organism”
    • 4.1Authorship distribution and conflict with WhoColor
    • 4.2IWAANs — Templates and protection
    • 4.3IWAANs — Actions over time
    • 4.4IWAANs — Talk topics
    • 4.5IWAANs — Impactful editors and token ownership
    • 4.6IWAANs — Editor activity drilldown
    • 4.7IWAANs — Text change overall
    • 4.8Focus on the “volatile phase”
    • 4.9Further large-scale changes and conflicts
    • 4.10Beyond predesigned interface modules
    • 4.11A note on privacy
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 31 October 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.121.07flo
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