Book Chapter (Draft): “The Most Controversial Topics in Wikipedia: A Multilingual and Geographical Analysis”

The following draft of a book chapter (scheduled for publication in 2014) was posted to arXiv a few days ago. It will be published in a book that will be published in 2014. Details below.

Title

The Most Controversial Topics in Wikipedia: A Multilingual and Geographical Analysis

Authors

Taha Yasseri
University of Oxford
Department of Theoretical Physics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Anselm Spoerri
School of Information and Communication, Rutgers University
Mark Graham
University of Oxford
János Kertész
Center for Network Science, Central European University
Department of Theoretical Physics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics

Source

arXiv.org
The chapter is scheduled to appear in: Global Wikipedia: International and cross-cultural issues in online collaboration.
Scarecrow Press (2014).
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 list of most controversial articles in different languages and the content related geographical locations will be presented. We discuss what the presented analysis and visualizations can tell us about the multicultural aspects of Wikipedia, and, in general, about cultures of peer-production with focus on universal and specifically, local features. We demonstrate that Wikipedia is more than just an encyclopaedia; it is also a window into divergent social-spatial priorities, interests and preferences.

Direct to Full Text (19 pages; PDF)
See Also: Research Paper: “Investigating Deletion in Wikipedia”
More Wikipedia-related research recently made available on arXiv.

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