The most controversial topics in Wikipedia: A multilingual and geographical analysis

TL;DR

This paper analyzes and visualizes the similarities and differences in controversial Wikipedia topics across 10 languages, revealing insights into multicultural perspectives and social priorities through geographic and content overlap analysis.

Contribution

It introduces methods to locate, measure, and categorize controversial topics in multilingual Wikipedia, providing visualizations of their overlaps and geographical content relations.

Findings

Wikipedia's controversial topics vary significantly across languages.

Geographical content influences the distribution of controversial articles.

The analysis reveals multicultural social and spatial priorities.

Abstract

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.