Societal Controversies in Wikipedia Articles

Erik Borra , Andreas Kaltenbrunner (1) , Michele Mauri (2) , Esther Weltevrede , David Laniado (3) , Richard Rogers (4) , Paolo Ciuccarelli (5) , Giovanni Magni , Tommaso Venturini (6, 7)

1 BMF - Barcelona Media Foundation
2 POLIMI - Politecnico di Milano [Milan]
3 Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione
4 UvA - Universiteit van Amsterdam
5 D.com Research Unit
6 médialab - médialab (Sciences Po)
7 CIS - Centre Internet et Société

Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead to conflict. We focus on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anyone may edit, where disputes about content in controversial articles often reflect larger societal debates. While Wikipedia has a public edit history and discussion section for every article, the substance of these sections is difficult to phantom for Wikipedia users interested in the development of an article and in locating which topics were most controversial. In this paper we present Contropedia, a tool that augments Wikipedia articles and gives insight into the development of controversial topics. Contropedia uses an efficient language agnostic measure based on the edit history that focuses on wiki links to easily identify which topics within a Wikipedia article have been most controversial and when.

Mots clés: Author Keywords Wikipedia; Controversy Mapping; Social Science; Data Visualization ACM Classification Keywords H53 [Group and Organization Interfaces]: Computer- supported cooperative work; D22 [Design Tools and Techniques]: User interfaces; Author Keywords Wikipedia

Domaines: Informatique et langage [cs.CL]; Sociologie

Erik Borra, Andreas Kaltenbrunner, Michele Mauri, Esther Weltevrede, David Laniado, et al.. Societal Controversies in Wikipedia Articles. the 33rd Annual ACM Conference, Apr 2015, Seoul, France. pp.193-196, ⟨10.1145/2702123.2702436⟩. ⟨hal-02102529⟩