Analysing Temporal Evolution of Interlingual Wikipedia Article Pairs
This work addresses the need for tools to analyze cross-lingual Wikipedia evolution for researchers and editors, but it is incremental as it builds on existing visualization and analysis methods.
The paper tackles the problem of analyzing how Wikipedia articles in different languages evolve independently, leading to divergent viewpoints and information inconsistencies, by presenting MultiWiki, a web-based interface that visualizes similarities and differences between interlingual article pairs over time, enabling users to track changes and compare snapshots.
Wikipedia articles representing an entity or a topic in different language editions evolve independently within the scope of the language-specific user communities. This can lead to different points of views reflected in the articles, as well as complementary and inconsistent information. An analysis of how the information is propagated across the Wikipedia language editions can provide important insights in the article evolution along the temporal and cultural dimensions and support quality control. To facilitate such analysis, we present MultiWiki - a novel web-based user interface that provides an overview of the similarities and differences across the article pairs originating from different language editions on a timeline. MultiWiki enables users to observe the changes in the interlingual article similarity over time and to perform a detailed visual comparison of the article snapshots at a particular time point.