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. Information Visualization (2008) 7, 34-48. doi: 10.1057/palgrave.ivs.9500171