Societal Controversies in Wikipedia Articles
This addresses the challenge for Wikipedia users and researchers in navigating and understanding societal debates reflected in article edits, though it is incremental as it builds on existing edit history data.
The paper tackles the problem of identifying and visualizing controversial topics within Wikipedia articles by developing Contropedia, a tool that uses an edit history-based measure to highlight and track contentious wiki links over time.
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.