Title: To beat or not to beat: uncovering the world social battles with Wikipedia

Authors: Massimo Marchiori; Enrico Bonetti Vieno

Addresses: European Institute for Science, Media and Democracy, 24 Boulevard Louis Schmidt, 1040 – Brussels, Belgium; University of Padua, Via Trieste 63, 35121 Padova, Italy ' University of Padua, Via Trieste 63, 35121 Padova, Italy

Abstract: The online world has deeply changed the rules of information: a few selected systems have emerged as centralisers, providing simplified access. On the one side, search engines compress the number of pages to interact with, and on the other side Wikipedia tries to compress information itself. These systems have had an enormous success, but success also brings problems. In the case of Wikipedia, these problems are due to its distributed nature: everybody can contribute and so also manipulate information in a way that is practically invisible to the general public. We describe the Negapedia system, an online public service providing a more complete picture of this underlying layer. We explain the challenges and choices that had to be made: big data analysis, potential information overload, and novel insights on the important issue of Wikipedia categorisation, analysing the problem of presenting general users with easy and meaningful category information.

Keywords: social data; big data analysis; Wikipedia; categorisation; online information.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBDI.2020.107377

International Journal of Big Data Intelligence, 2020 Vol.7 No.2, pp.110 - 125

Received: 01 Mar 2019
Accepted: 03 Nov 2019
Published online: 21 May 2020 *

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