The most controversial topics in Wikipedia: A multilingual and geographical analysis
This work provides insights into multicultural aspects and peer-production practices on Wikipedia, though it is incremental in analyzing multilingual and geographical data.
The study analyzed controversial topics across 10 language versions of Wikipedia to identify similarities and differences in edit wars, revealing that Wikipedia reflects convergent and divergent social-spatial priorities and interests.
We present, visualize and analyse the similarities and differences between the controversial topics related to "edit wars" identified in 10 different language versions of Wikipedia. After a brief review of the related work we describe the methods developed to locate, measure, and categorize the controversial topics in the different languages. Visualizations of the degree of overlap between the top 100 lists of most controversial articles in different languages and the content related to geographical locations will be presented. We discuss what the presented analysis and visualizations can tell us about the multicultural aspects of Wikipedia and practices of peer-production. Our results indicate that Wikipedia is more than just an encyclopaedia; it is also a window into convergent and divergent social-spatial priorities, interests and preferences.