What’s in Wikipedia? mapping topics and conflict using socially annotated category structure

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia which has undergone tremendous growth. However, this same growth has made it difficult to characterize its content and coverage. In this paper we develop measures to map Wikipedia using its socially annotated, hierarchical category structure. We introduce a mapping technique that takes advantage of socially-annotated hierarchical categories while dealing with the inconsistencies and noise inherent in the distributed way that they are generated. The technique is demonstrated through two applications: mapping the distribution of topics in Wikipedia and how they have changed over time; and mapping the degree of conflict found in each topic area. We also discuss the utility of the approach for other applications and datasets involving collaboratively annotated category hierarchies.

Citation

Kittur, A.; Suh, B.; Chi, E. H. What's in Wikipedia? mapping topics and conflict using socially annotated category structure. 27th Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009); 2009 April 4-9; Boston MA.