WikiPulse - A News-Portal Based on Wikipedia

More and more user-generated content is complementing conventional journalism. While we don't think that CNN or New York Times and its professional journalists will disappear anytime soon, formidable competition is emerging through humble Wikipedia editors. In earlier work (Becker 2012), we found that entertainment and sports news appeared on average about two hours earlier on Wikipedia than on CNN and Reuters online. In this project we build a news-reader that automatically identifies late-breaking news among the most recent Wikipedia articles and then displays it on a dedicated Web site.Comment: Presented at COINs13 Conference, Chile, 2013 (arxiv:1308.1028

Cultural Anthropology through the Lens of Wikipedia: Historical Leader Networks, Gender Bias, and News-based Sentiment

In this paper we study the differences in historical World View between Western and Eastern cultures, represented through the English, the Chinese, Japanese, and German Wikipedia. In particular, we analyze the historical networks of the World's leaders since the beginning of written history, comparing them in the different Wikipedias and assessing cultural chauvinism. We also identify the most influential female leaders of all times in the English, German, Spanish, and Portuguese Wikipedia. As an additional lens into the soul of a culture we compare top terms, sentiment, emotionality, and complexity of the English, Portuguese, Spanish, and German Wikinews