¹Department of Computer & Information Science, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany

Correspondence: Jürgen Lerner, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Konstanz, Box D 67, 78457 Konstanz, Germany. Tel: +49 7531 88 4436; Fax: +49 7531 88 3577; E-mail: lerner@inf.uni-konstanz.de

A preliminary version of this paper appeared in Brandes and Lerner.¹

Received 1 December 2007; Accepted 5 January 2008; Published online 28 February 2008.

Abstract

Wikipedia is a large and rapidly growing Web-based collaborative authoring environment, where anyone on the Internet can create, modify, and delete pages about encyclopedic topics. A remarkable property of some Wikipedia pages is that they are written by up to thousands of authors who may have contradicting opinions. In this paper, we show that a visual analysis of the 'who revises whom'-network gives deep insight into controversies. We propose a set of analysis and visualization techniques that reveal the dominant authors of a page, the roles they play, and the alters they confront. Thereby we provide tools to understand how Wikipedia authors collaborate in the presence of controversy.