Visualizing Wikipedia Article and User Networks

Abstract

As a public and open-source resource, Wikipedia is used by many in the public as a quick reference; academic researchers have tapped Wikipedia for human- and machine-based insights. The MediaWiki understructure enables a wide range of transparency, enabling users to very easily search and access template-structured text and image contents, source citations, contributors, page histories, and others. Transparency has been hard-wired into the platform technology. Developers have been building tools to extend the transparency of data built on a MediaWiki understructure. Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel (NodeXL) features a third-party graph data importer that enables the extraction of MediaWiki article (and user) networks, which include all of the languages of Wikipedias. This chapter highlights the uses of graphs from two main types of Wikipedia pages for increased knowledge transparency: (1) topical article pages and (2) contributor user pages (whether human or robot).