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.
The graph above represents the net of connections between the Wikipedia pages related to the net neutrality one. The first thing we can see in this graph is the division in three main clusters (see the image here below).
It is easy now to recognize a bigger and more central cluster and two smaller ones. There are also many bridge clusters and external ones, but the most interesting fact is that the Net Neutrality page (in the red circle) doesn't belong to any of these clusters. We can see in the image below how it actually is in between two clusters.
The final visualization above presents a further codification: nodes are divided into two different categories, depending on the content of the pages: ethical terms are red, while technical ones are blue. Finally, the dimension of the dots depends on their own inDegree, which means that the more a dot the more it was linked by others.
Clicking on the dots allows to isolate the nodes linking or linked to the one you clicked on. In order to fully understand the graph it's possible to zoom in and out in the visualization to see smaller nodes.
The starting point of this visualization are 5 wikipedia pages related to the Net Neutrality issue. In particular we decided to take pages that could describe the topic from different point of view. These are the five starting point:
Starting from this five links we obtained all the see also pages connected to them. We then were able to automatically calculate the see also of the see also pages till the third level, thanks to Seealsology tool. The result was an amount of 25000 connections.
We then imported the file in Gephi and, after cleaning the data, we were able to study and export the graph above.
The final graph above represents the net of connessions between Wikipedia links. In order to understand fully the graph it's important to take a look at the How to read the visualization paragraph.
As we've seen in previous paragraphs, the Net Neutrality node is outside the clusters we recognized, in particular it is located in between the central and bigger group and the one in the bottom. Once again: red dots represent Wikipedia pages that focus on ethical issues, while blue ones represent pages with more technical content. What's more interesting here is that Net Neutrality page is right in between a blue and a red area. Although this seems to be a very summary information, it is actually the point of our research. We will eximine this aspect in depth in the next chapters, but what is really important to notice here is that net neutrality stands in the middle between ethical and technical arguments.
