It’s been quite of an year for net neutrality, and the first step in studying the debate about it is to understand what we're really talking about. What we need to understand and, in some way, to demonstrate is that there's a debate going on. Wikipedia, with its 500 million unique visitors each month and more than 22 million accounts seems to be the perfect "enviroment" to begin to study network neutrality.
This visualization shows the changes of the Net Neutrality Wikipedia page. From left to right we have a timeline going from January 2005 to December 2014. Every step of this timeline represent a month. In the upper part of the graph we can see the amount of Kb added (red) to the page and the total weight of the page (grey) changing throughout time. Back-to-front, in the lower part we see the amount of Kb removed (black) from it.
The starting point of this graph is the Net Neutrality Wikipedia page . It isn’t the only one relevant for our research, but it’s, by far, the most complete: created in 2005, with 1539 distinct authors and more than 4000 edits represents a good starting point in studying the debate on net neutrality .
Using the Kimono tool we were able to obtain all the data from the history of this page, such as the author of the post, the total weight of the page and the date and time when the post was created. Focusing on the page weight, we were able to see every single change made throughout the last 10 years, calculating the amount of bytes added, removed and the total weight of the page every month. Starting from this data, we distributed them through the years in a timeline, creating the graph above.
What we see from this graph is, for many aspects, quite interesting. At a first glance, we're able to see there's been a lot of people speaking on this page. As we can see there are a lot of climax throughout time which give us a lot of information. First of all we infer that net neutrality is a theme that make people speak about it. And we can also see net neutrality is not an issue as "new" as we tought, people talked a lot about it even before the latest goings-on.
Another interesting point that come out from this graph is that people are not just talking about net neutrality, but there seems to be a real discussion going on. We can see that every time there is a big increase of the page dimension, there's also a similar and opposite decrease of it. As we're looking at a Wikipedia page this give us the proof that net neutrality is still the focus of open and maybe row discussion.
It's interesting to see that the highest peak is located in 2006, more precisly in June, and May also has a very high increase of Kb added. But why? Althoug the term net neutrality was conied years before, 2006 was the first time the term became public because in May of that year the Senate of the United States of America started to consider a Net Neutrality law. It is clear that 2006 was the very first year of the debate on net neutrality.
