Negapedia: The negative side of wikipedia

Wikipedia is nowadays the primary source of general information to the public, the real number one informative media of our era. Nevertheless, this authoritative nature is only the visible side: in fact, the information building process that lies at the heart of Wikipedia is a social one, and as such it brings along another level of complexity. What we see is just the tip of the iceberg, the by-product of a series of information battles where people fight for various social reasons, including bias and commercial interests. This building process has so far remained hidden, whereas it is an essential component of the overall information, showing how much a topic is stable or is instead controversial. In this paper we briefly introduce Negapedia, a project that for the first time aims to show to the general public this so far missing “negative” side of Wikipedia. The goal of the system, besides its research interest, is to increase the level of awareness of the public, showing the world of controversies beneath each argument, and also providing panoramic and historical views of the information battles that shape the information present in Wikipedia.