WikiNetViz: Visualizing friends and adversaries in implicit social networks

When multiple users with diverse backgrounds and beliefs edit Wikipedia together, disputes often arise due to disagreements among the users. In this paper, we introduce a novel visualization tool known as WikiNetViz to visualize and analyze disputes among users in a dispute-induced social network. WikiNetViz is designed to quantify the degree of dispute between a pair of users using the article history. Each user (and article) is also assigned a controversy score by our proposed Controversy Rank model so as to measure the degree of controversy of a user (and an article) by the amount of disputes between the user (article) and other users in articles of varying degrees of controversy. On the constructed social network, WikiNetViz can perform clustering so as to visualize the dynamics of disputes at the user group level. It also provides an article viewer for examining an article revision so as to determine the article content modified by different users.