Societal Controversies in Wikipedia Articles

TL;DR

This paper introduces Contropedia, a tool that analyzes Wikipedia edit histories to identify and visualize the most controversial topics within articles, helping users understand societal debates reflected in Wikipedia content.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, language-agnostic measure based on edit history and wiki links to detect and visualize controversy in Wikipedia articles.

Findings

Contropedia effectively highlights controversial topics within articles.

The tool provides insights into the temporal development of controversies.

It enhances understanding of societal debates reflected in Wikipedia content.

Abstract

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.