The most controversial topics in Wikipedia: A multilingual and geographical analysis

We present, visualize and analyse the similarities and differences between the controversial topics related to "edit wars" identified in 10 different language versions of Wikipedia. After a brief review of the related work we describe the methods developed to locate, measure, and categorize the controversial topics in the different languages. Visualizations of the degree of overlap between the top 100 lists of most controversial articles in different languages and the content related to geographical locations will be presented. We discuss what the presented analysis and visualizations can tell us about the multicultural aspects of Wikipedia and practices of peer-production. Our results indicate that Wikipedia is more than just an encyclopaedia; it is also a window into convergent and divergent social-spatial priorities, interests and preferences.Comment: This is a draft of a book chapter to be published in 2014 by Scarecrow Press. Please cite as: Yasseri T., Spoerri A., Graham M., and Kert\'esz J., The most controversial topics in Wikipedia: A multilingual and geographical analysis. In: Fichman P., Hara N., editors, Global Wikipedia:International and cross-cultural issues in online collaboration. Scarecrow Press (2014

InfoCrystal, a visual tool for information retrieval

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 1995.Includes bibliographical references (p. 227-232).by Anselm Spoerri.Ph.D

Visualizing Meta Search Results: Evaluating the MetaCrystal Toolset

MetaCrystal aims to help users find the documents that are most likely to be relevant. It compares the results returned by multiple search engines and displays the documents based on the number of engines that found them and their rank positions in the result lists. First, this paper examines the validity of the MetaCrystal design approach by calculating the probability that a document is relevant based on the number of engines that found it and its rank positions in the result lists. Using TREC data, it is shown that MetaCrystal’s visual design is sound because it visually emphasizes documents based on their likelihood of being relevant. Second, this paper investigates if users are able to use the MetaCrystal‘s visualizations to find the documents that are most likely to be relevant. The results of a user study are reported that show that novice users are able to accomplish this task

What is popular on Wikipedia and why?

This paper analyzes which pages and topics are the most popular on Wikipedia and why. For the period of September 2006 to January 2007, the 100 most visited Wikipedia pages in a month are identified and categorized in terms of the major topics of interest. The observed topics are compared with search behavior on the Web. Search queries, which are identical to the titles of the most popular Wikipedia pages, are submitted to major search engines and the positions of popular Wikipedia pages in the top 10 search results are determined. The presented data helps to explain how search engines, and Google in particular, fuel the growth and shape what is popular on Wikipedia

Visual Mashup of Text and Media Search Results

There is a growing trend of enabling users to view diverse sources of data in an integrated manner, called visual mashups. This paper addresses the problem of how to visualize diverse data sources in a single integrated display when geographical meta-data is not available or advisable to use to combine the data sources. A visual mashup of web, image, video, news, blog and tagging search results is introduced. The presented solution makes it possible to visualize relationships between the different data sources, which would be difficult to show in a series of mini-displays arranged in a grid layout. 1