Wikipedia's Network Bias on Controversial Topics

The most important feature of Wikipedia is the presence of hyperlinks in pages. Link placement is the product of people's collaboration, consequently Wikipedia naturally inherits human bias. Due to the high influence that links' disposition has on users' navigation sessions, one needs to verify that, given a controversial topic, the hyperlinks' network does not expose users to only one side of the subject. A Wikipedia's topic-induced network that prevents users the discovery of different facets of an issue, suffers from structural bias. In this work, we define the static structural bias, which indicates if the strength of connections between pages of contrasting inclinations is the same, and the dynamic structural bias, which quantifies the network's level bias that users face over the course of their navigation sessions. Our measurements of structural bias on several controversial topics demonstrate its existence, revealing that users have low likelihood of reaching pages of opposing inclination from where they start, and that they navigate Wikipedia showing a behaviour much more biased than the expected from the baselines. Our findings advance the relevance of the problem and pave the way for developing systems that automatically measure and propose hyperlink locations that minimize the presence and effects of structural bias

Mimicking news: how the credibility of an established tabloid is used when disseminating racism

This article explores the mimicking of tabloid news as a form of covert racism, relying on the credibility of an established tabloid newspaper. The qualitative case study focuses on a digital platform for letters to the editor, operated without editorial curation pre-publication from 2010 to 2018 by one of Denmark's largest newspapers, Ekstra Bladet. A discourse analysis of the 50 most shared letters to the editor on Facebook shows that nativist, far-right actors used the platform to disseminate fear-mongering discourses and xenophobic conspiracy theories, disguised as professional news and referred to as articles. These processes took place at the borderline of true and false as well as racist and civil discourse. At this borderline, a lack of supervision and moderation coupled with the openness and visual design of the platform facilitated new forms of covert racism between journalism and user-generated content

Spillovers in networks of user generated content : evidence from 23 natural experiments on Wikipedia

Endogeneity in network formation hinders the identification of the role that social networks play in generating spillovers, peer effects and other externalities. This paper tackles this problem and investigates how the link network between articles on the German Wikipedia influences the attention and content generation individual articles receive. Identification exploits local exogenous shocks on a small number of nodes in the network. It can thus avoid the usually required, but strong, assumptions of exogenous observed characteristics and link structure in networks. Exogenous variation is generated by natural and technical disasters or by articles being featured on the German Wikipedia’s start page. The effects on neighboring pages are substantial; I observe an increase of almost 100 percent in terms of both views and content generation. The aggregate effect over all neighbors is also large: I find that a view on a treated article converts one for one into a view on a neighboring article. However, the resulting content generation is small in absolute terms. My approach also applies if, due to a lack of network data, identification through partial overlaps in the network structure fails (e.g. in classrooms). It helps bridge the gap between the experimental and social network literatures on peer effects

Math Search for the Masses: Multimodal Search Interfaces and Appearance-Based Retrieval

We summarize math search engines and search interfaces produced by the Document and Pattern Recognition Lab in recent years, and in particular the min math search interface and the Tangent search engine. Source code for both systems are publicly available. "The Masses" refers to our emphasis on creating systems for mathematical non-experts, who may be looking to define unfamiliar notation, or browse documents based on the visual appearance of formulae rather than their mathematical semantics.Comment: Paper for Invited Talk at 2015 Conference on Intelligent Computer Mathematics (July, Washington DC

Glyphs for exploring crowd-sourced subjective survey classification

The findings drawn from opinion survey responses are usually made by producing summary charts or conducting statistical analysis. Both involve data aggregation and filtering as exploring the unaggregated data has traditionally been impractical or error-prone for large numbers of responses. We propose the use of glyphs with parallel coordinate plots to show all survey responses in a single view and design an interactive visual analytics tool around the representation to explore the data. We use this software for a ‘photo content assessment’ survey, where 359 participants classify 900 images by seven criteria. The proposed approach allows all 8,434 responses (49,285 answers to questions in total) to be represented in a single view and helps analysts to both clean the data and understand the nature of the survey responses. We describe the construction of the survey response glyphs and the interface to the interactive visual analytics software and generalise the design principles that arise from the approach. We apply the tool to two other datasets to evaluate the technique and to confirm its wider applicability for surveys with Likert scale responses

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research