The People Perspective: Categorization and Controversial Information in Wikipedia

摘要

Categorization has been one of the keys that allowed people to handle large quantities of information: instead of digesting a large block of data, we find order, classify, and navigate to the parts we are interested in. Successful categorizations are the key to successful online systems, even more in large portals. Here, we analyse the case of the biggest information portal of our era: Wikipedia. We focus on usability, and discuss the choices behind a constrained categorization, showing the impact on people by actually experimenting with a large group of people, monitoring their behaviour. We show how a real-life constrained categorization is evaluated by users, and how quality actually depends on the kind of argument. Then, we also focus on the relationship between controversy of an argument and user interest: are people more attracted to controversial topics? In other words, does controversy imply interest? We tackle this problem by piggybacking an existing information portal, so to study actual people behaviour, and find that there are indeed intimate relationships between controversy and popularity.