Wiki evolution

Introduction

This part of our work, is a focus on the wikipedia ambient. We decided to lead a research on the evolution in the public enciclopedia about our main theme "right to be forgotten".

We chosen the most influential languages that we had observed during our first phase of research.
We operated a quantity-quality investigation on these pages, combining the quantity of bytes of each page with the content of the texts. Our aim was to verificate if there were common topics, and which page was the best updated.

The graph below shows the byte increase of each wikipedia page about our topic. It's evident that some pages are bigger than other.

How to read the first visualization

This graph shows the evolution of the wikipedia pages about the "right to be forgotten".

On the vertical line there are marked the years from 2007 to the day of the analysis. While on the top border are marked the five languages used. For each language there is a specific color.
Each vertical line represent an event, and its trend. The point at the beginning of the line shows the start of an event, an horizontal line shows the terminate of its. In addiction there is a double point on those events common in multiple languages.

Hovering with the mouse on each single line it showed an information plaque about that event. In particular, if an event is present in more languages them will be light up all together.

How to read the second visualization

The second graph that shows the byte increase of each wikipedia page about our topic has the same order of reading.
On the vertical line there are marked the years from 2007 to the day of the analysis. While on the top border are marked the byte dimension. After the 0 the addictions, and before it the negative modifications. For each language there is a specific color.

How it has been done

We searched for the page of wikipedia "Right to be forgotten". From that page we connected to the pages about right to be forgotten in the languages: Italian, French, Spanish, German, (these languages has been chosen because them are the most influential in Europe).
Then, we extracted the elements of the page "view history". After that, we transported the data set into an excel page, and generating a formula we calculate the difference of bytes for each edit. As result, we had a dataset that can generate the next graphs.

The first step was to generate the graph that we called "Wiki history events" posted on the page Wiki evolution.
Then, we used the page "View History" to see the evolution of the page for each language. During the analysis, we checked the differences between the different versions, and we took note of all the most important events. As conclusion, we looked for connections and similarities between the most relevant cases.
In the end, we integrate on illustrator (single point for national facts, and double point for common international events).

Using the same dataset, we create the second graph. We generated a pivot tab on Excel; than we created a stacked area chart. In the end, we integrated the result in illustrator, using a different color for each language.

Findings

When we started we thought that the major european languages could be the most updated about our topic, but in the end this opinion was discredited.
In fact, there has been an incongruity between the world events about the right to be forgotten and the improving of the wikipedia pages.

As result, we found some common topics in each of these pages. In other cases, we couldn't compare with to each other because some pages had not got some of these arguments.
However, this analysis allowed us to see that the right to be forgotten had developed a very different growth in the european states.

Metadata

Timestamp: 26/11/2014 - 3/12/2014

Data source: Wikipedia

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