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In:Investigating Wikipedia: Linguistic corpus building, exploration and analysis
Edited by Céline Poudat, Harald Lüngen and Laura Herzberg
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 121] 2024
► pp. 156–177

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Chapter 6
Exploring the evolution of Wikipedia articles through Contropedia

 | Eurecat — Technology Centre of Catalonia
 | Politecnico di Milano
 | University of Amsterdam
Published online: 31 October 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.121.06lan
Abstract
Wikipedia is not just a corpus of encyclopedic articles; it also includes an entire edit history that details the evolution of each article. However, such records are often unknown to the general public, and too complex for researchers to use. Contropedia uses innovative techniques to allow for the visualization, exploration and investigation of the evolution of Wikipedia articles and disputes about their content. This chapter introduces Contropedia and provides an in-depth analysis of two articles from the WikiDemoCorpus: the English language article ‘Chiropractic’ and a multilingual comparison of articles on the European migration crisis. These use cases illustrate Contropedia’s visual and analytical modules for analyzing controversies within an article and for cross-cultural comparison.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Description of Contropedia
    • 2.1Related work
    • 2.2Tool rationale and method
    • 2.3Interface description
      • 2.3.1Layer view
      • 2.3.2Dashboard view
      • 2.3.3Detailed view
  • 3.Cross-language comparison
    • 3.1Case study: European migrant crisis
      • 3.1.1Comparing the overall activity using the “layer view”
      • 3.1.2Identifying the most controversial shared elements using the “dashboard view”
      • 3.1.3Comparing the evolution of controversial elements using the “detailed view”
      • 3.1.4Analyzing language-specific controversial elements using the “detailed view”
    • 3.2Discussion
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (32)
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