Exploring the evolution of Wikipedia articles through Contropedia

Wikipedia is not just a corpus of encyclopedic articles; it also includes an entire edit history that details the evolution of each article. However, such records are often unknown to the general public, and too complex for researchers to use. Contropedia uses innovative techniques to allow for the visualization, exploration and investigation of the evolution of Wikipedia articles and disputes about their content. This chapter introduces Contropedia and provides an in-depth analysis of two articles from the WikiDemoCorpus: the English language article ‘Chiropractic’ and a multilingual comparison of articles on the European migration crisis. These use cases illustrate Contropedia’s visual and analytical modules for analyzing controversies within an article and for cross-cultural comparison.