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

TLDR

The study presents, visualizes, and analyzes similarities and differences among controversial “edit‑war” topics across ten Wikipedia language versions, and discusses what these analyses reveal about multicultural aspects of Wikipedia and peer‑production cultures. The authors developed methods to locate, measure, and categorize controversial topics in each language and produced visualizations of overlap among the top 100 controversial articles and their geographic content. The analysis demonstrates that Wikipedia reflects divergent social‑spatial priorities, interests, and preferences, functioning as more than an encyclopedia.

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.