2014
Politecnico di Milano
School of Design
Communication Design
Master's Degree Thesis
School of Design
Communication Design
Master's Degree Thesis
Wikipedia is the largest and most popular online encyclopaedia, built by the collaboration and coordination of its users. Anyone can edit a page and improve the articles, as long as three core content policies of "neutral point of view", "verifiability" and "no original research" are respected. Despite Wikipedia’s purpose to build contents by reaching consensus among different positions, sometimes a balance is hard to reach when dealing with complex and controversial issues.
Here finds its origin and motivation the analysis of the article “Family planning” of the English version of Wikipedia as a case study for understanding the development of controversies on the web. By looking at the “revision history” page, a detailed picture of the phenomena is given by mining the data with the help of digital methods and the use of visualization guided by experts’ opinion.
The methods and procedures applied to this case study can be considered an experimental model for exploring the complex and dynamic setting of Wikipedia. They can be applied to other controversial topics to give new insight to Wikipedia researchers, social scientists and anthropologists, but also to topic experts and even general public. From a wider point of view, in this project shows the role of visualization as means to produce new knowledge and information that can be applied to various academic fields.
Projected developed in collaboration with Density Design Research Lab, MédiaLab of Science Po and the World Health Organization.
