Wiki editors

Introduction

The second analysis unfolds other aspects related to our Wikipedia environment, indeed it tries to locate our topic, the right to be forgotten, by mapping the Wikipedia pages containing a link to the Right to be forgotten page. This relation becomes very interesting once we added informations about the date and authorship of the link, giving us an overview of what seem to be the closest topics and how the discussion was carried on before and after the creation of its own page.

Simultaneously, for each RTBF Wikipedia page in the five different languages, we did a further in-depth investigation to show the main editors of those pages, and which other pages they contributed on Wikipedia.

How to read the first visualization

Each radial line originating from the center of the visualization is a Wikipedia page containing a link to the Right to be forgotten page, the length of each bar is a time scale which goes from the start of the page at the farthest point from the center to today that is the center of the visualization.

Where we see the line not coloured means that the page exhists but it doesn’t contain any reference or link to the topic of Web oblivion. At a certain point on a line might appear a big dot. Each dot represents the link to the topic page, in case the dot is coloured it means that the link was created from a major author of the Right to be forgotten page, otherwise the dot appears in grayscale.

When the bar of an article becomes coloured it means that inside the article it starts to mention and talk about the Right to be forgotten. The circled dashed line puts on the timeline the date of creation of the topic article.

How it has been done

We took into consideration the Wikipedia pages for Right to be forgotten in the five main languages, that we considered be the most relevant for which events occurred in their countries, namely English, Spanish, French, Italian and German.

For each page we extracted a list of the main authors, specifically only those who contributed with more than 50 bytes of text.

Back to the five different pages in different languages, for each one of them we opened from the left menu “What links here”, obtaining a list of Wikipedia pages containing a link to the main topic page. By using the “Wikiblame” tool we were able to retrieve the first article revision in which appears the term “right to be forgotten”.

By matching the two datasets we created a visualization showing in which date, inside a page linking to the Right to be forgotten page, started to appear the term “right to be forgotten” and whether this was a link to the main page or if it was part of a paragraph.

Findings

Two main aspects we can point out from the visualization, one deals with the differences from language to language. Different wikipedia languages mean total different communities curating pages and approaching topics in different ways, this in relation to the culture and knowledge of the authors. Some pages are deeply connected to a variety of pages, like the English one which has more than 20 backlink, others like the spanish one, holds just a couple.

But let’s study the kind of relation established between two pages, we can notice that some pages are more “closely” related to the main topic when the link is created near to the creation of the linked page, and even more if the one putting the link is a major author of the previous. We can see that in the English page the topic was discussed also previously of the creation of the page, namely inside the pages of “Data Protection Law”, “Internet privacy” and “Do not track legislation”. After the page was created the links that are added afterward show the evolution of the debate on the timeline through new issues and cases. We see adding up in this order pages like: “Censorship by Google”, “Freedom of speech”, “Dougie McDonald” and “Streisand effect” . The analysis unfolds other curious aspects marking differences between languages, for example the italian page, which hit us because it exists since 2007, years before any other page, is linked to pages which cover very technical and law-related subjects such as “Diffamazione”. “Ingiuria”, “Esclusione della prova liberatoria” showing on which topic the authors of the page are better prepared.

Metadata

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

Data source: Wikipedia

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