Towards better visual tools for exploring Wikipedia article development - The use case of "Gamergate controversy

Abstract

We present a comparative analysis of three tools for visually exploring the revision history of a Wikipedia article. We do so on the use case of "Gamergate Controversy", an article that has been the setting of a major editor dispute in the last half of 2014 and early 2015, resulting in multiple editor bans and gathering news media attention. We show how our tools can be used to visually explore editor disagreement interactions and networks, as well as conflicted content and provenance, and present some of the results. We argue that these individual tools could benefit from synergies by combining them and lay out a possible architecture for doing so.