Negapedia, the negative version of Wikipedia: a trip into conflicts and passions

If you had to define Wikipedia using only one word, what would you use? The answer is easy: crowdsourcing. It is the power of crowdsourcing (individual efforts that, summed up, make for a greater whole) that contributed to the enormous growth of Wikipedia, leading it to its success. However, anything has pro’s and con’s, and as such even crowdsourcing, a beautiful and effective idea, has its pitfalls. The dark side of crowdsourcing is just its distributed nature: if everyone can contribute, then also everyone can destroy. “Destroy” here is used figuratively: destroy the impartiality of the information. So, what can happen is that everyone can alter information according to various pulses, like bias, personal interests, commercial factors, political motivations and so on. Information can therefore be changed, added, removed, so to present users with a certain biased perspective. All this process stays in the background, as normal users are only presented with the final version of every page, assuming it is the definitive answer whereas it may be just a transient by-product of the underlying information war. In order to ameliorate this problem, and also to further study these phenomena, Negapedia, the negative version of Wikipedia, has been introduced. Negapedia is an online system that analyzes these underlying layers of social wars and make them explicit via online portals, so that anyone can actually see what is going on behind the scene and grasp the complex turmoil that is behind the visible outer layer of Wikipedia. In this paper we illustrate the state of project and its most recent developments.