PopCulture - Wikipedia as a mirror of society

Nuno João da Silva

Key information

Authors:

Nuno João da Silva (Nuno João da Silva Garcia)

Supervisors:

Daniel Jorge Viegas Gonçalves (Daniel Jorge Viegas Gonçalves)

Published in

08/01/2012

Abstract

Wikipedia is a collaborative website which has been growing in popularity. As its popularity grows, so does the likelihood of it reflecting the opinion of society as a whole. For example, if an article has an unusually higher number of edits, we can conclude that it is associated with a popular topic. If an article is targeted by an unusual amount of edits made with the sole purpose of disturbing the work of other editors, this allows us to conclude that the article is about a controversial topic. Thus, it is of interest to analyze Wikipedia data in order to draw conjectures about the public opinion, by condensing content, metrics and other information, along with their evolution through time, in a single visualization. Due to the significant amount of information involved, this is a goal other works have not excelled at, and which we try to accomplish with the work we present here. After identifying a meaningful set of metrics, we crafted a unifying visualization that allows the easy analysis of the evolution of particular articles. Furthermore, several articles (even from different language-specific Wikipedias) can be directly compared in the same visualization, leading to additional insights on possible correlations. Our user evaluation showed that the system has good usability, and that users are able to find meaningful insights. A series of case studies revealed that they could find patterns and infer hypotheses on the activity of Wikipedia articles. This is indicative of the adequateness of our solution.