Presentation of Contropedia at CHI 2015, Seoul. 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. Paper: http://contropedia.net/publications/Borra%20et%20al.%20-%202015%20-%20Societal%20Controversies%20in%20Wikipedia%20Articles%20-%20post-print.pdf More info: http://contropedia.net/

1. Societal Controversies in Wikipedia Articles
Erik Borra, Esther Weltevrede, Andreas Kaltenbrunner,
Michele Mauri, David Laniado, Richard Rogers,
Paolo Ciuccarelli, Giovanni Magni, Tommaso Venturini
david.laniado@barcelonamedia.org
www.contropedia.net

2. Wikipedia
● largest repository of human
knowledge
● anyone may edit it
● conditions and reflects
public opinion

3. ● article on global warming (image)

6. <2MB image of Global Warming overlay

7. Controversiality measure
● count edits to sentences including a wiki link
● substantive, disagreeing edits
○ no vandalism edits
○ only consider deletions from sentences
● language agnostic approach

8. <2MB image of Global Warming dashboard

10. Contropedia can:
● show what was most disputed in an article,
when and why
● increase transparency in Wikipedia
● lower barriers to participation
● foster critical digital literacy

11. Work in progress
● integrating talk pages
● beyond wiki links: templates, references,
images
● edit networks, editor camps
● cross-language visualizations (comparison)
● networks of articles

12. Try the Contropedia demo!
http://www.contropedia.net/demo
david.laniado@barcelonamedia.org