Wikipedia is one of the most widely used repositories of human knowledge today, contributed mostly by a few hundred thousand regular editors. In this open environment, inevitably, differences of opinion arise among editors of the same article. Especially for polemical topics such as religion and politics, difference of opinions among editors may lead to intense "edit wars" in which editors compete to have their opinions and points of view accepted. While such disputes can compromise the reliability of the article (or at least portions of it), they are recorded in the edit history of the articles. We posit that exposing such disputes to the reader, and pointing to the portions of the text where they manifest most prominently can be beneficial in helping concerned readers in understanding such topics. In this paper, we discuss our initial efforts towards the problem of automatic evaluation of extracting controversial points in Wikipedia pages.
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Towards identifying arguments in Wikipedia pages
Semantic Scholar · Computer Science · 2011
Abstract
Wikipedia is one of the most widely used repositories of human knowledge today, contributed mostly by a few hundred thousand regular editors. In this open environment, inevitably, differences of opinion arise among editors of the same article. Especially for polemical topics such as religion and politics, difference of opinions among editors may lead to intense "edit wars" in which editors compete to have their opinions and points of view accepted. While such disputes can compromise the reliability of the article (or at least portions of it), they are recorded in the edit history of the articles. We posit that exposing such disputes to the reader, and pointing to the portions of the text where they manifest most prominently can be beneficial in helping concerned readers in understanding such topics. In this paper, we discuss our initial efforts towards the problem of automatic evaluation of extracting controversial points in Wikipedia pages.