EEI SEMINAR: “Contropedia: exploring societal controversies in Wikipedia articles” by David Laniado

EEI SEMINAR: “Contropedia: exploring societal controversies in Wikipedia articles”





Speaker: David Laniado, Eurecat



Moderator: Antonio Bontempi. ICTA-UAB

Day: Wednesday, April 24th

Time: 12.30h

Room: Z/023

As the Internet has become a primary source of information for citizens, and at the same time an arena in which different and potentially conflicting viewpoints coexist and compete with each other, it is increasingly important to be able to understand the socio-technical aspects of such controversies. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is paramount in this setting, as it plays a central role for virtually any kind of inquiry in Western societies, and increasingly worldwide. Wikipedia’s core principle ‘neutral point of view’ is assured by the possibility of editors with different viewpoints to correct each other and write it in such a way that all significant viewpoints are represented with due weight. The quality of Wikipedia, in other words, is made possible by the struggle over its content. Such conflicts are transparent, as all edits are logged and publicly available, as well as the associated discussions. However, this information is just presented in the form of huge logs in reverse chronological order, so it is not easy to make sense of it, and the social process behind the construction of articles remains mostly hidden. The Contropedia platform provides a visual interface to make easily accessible and explorable the edit history of an article. In this seminar we will see how Contropedia can be used to analyze the development of Wikipedia articles, to identify disputed elements and to inspect controversies about specific topics, with examples from environmental issues such as Global warming and GMOs.

Bio

David Laniado is senior research scientist at Eurecat, in the field Computational Social Science. He obtained from Politecnico di Milano his master degree in Computer Engineering in 2007, and his PhD in Information Engineering in 2012. Since 2010 at Barcelona Media, and since 2015 at Eurecat, he has been working on quantitative approaches to analyse and characterise online communities, ranging from social network analysis to data mining and sentiment analysis. His main research interest is the study of patterns of online conversation and discussion, participatory democracy and deliberation processes, gender differences and socio-technical aspects of online interactions.