Infographic Explores Deletion Discussions On Wikipedia

While Wikipedia is a great resource for information on everything from defunct amusement parks in New Jersey to people with a condition similar to Jim Carrey’s character in The Truman Show, as a crowdsourced, volunteer-based online entity it’s controlled and regulated by editors, and like all editors, they choose what topics should and shouldn’t be included on the site. Those articles end up getting deleted and sent to the great Trash Bin in a sunless digital universe. How and why those collective decisions are made is something that Moritz Stefaner, Dario Taraborelli, and Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia explore in visual form in their project Notabilia: Visualizing Deletion Discussions on Wikipedia.

Likening Wikipedia’s editorial process to gardeners weeding a garden, they remark that any editor can nominate an article for deletion and, if legitimate, it prompts a community discussion—usually lasting about a week—where voices for and against are heard. At the end an administrator reviews it and makes a decision.

Here’s how they went about creating their infographic:

We analyzed and visualized Article for Deletion (AfD) discussions in the English Wikipedia. The visualization represents the 100 longest discussions that resulted in the deletion of the respective article. AfD discussions are represented by a thread starting at the bottom center. Each time a user joins an AfD discussion and recommends to keep, merge, or redirect the article a green segment leaning towards the left is added. Each time a user recommends to delete the article a red segment leaning towards the right is added. As the discussion progresses, the length of the segments as well as the angle slowly decay.

In their interactive data visualization (see our quick reference guide here for a primer on data visualizations) you can click on a branch of the “tree” and be taken to the Wikipedia AfD log explaining why different editors disliked or disproved of an entry. The deleted articles in the graphic range from the controversial (Bush Crimes Commission) to pure fantasy (Second Wizarding War), and the project contextualizes these by analyzing various other aspects of the deletion process; highlighting the variety of AfD discussion patterns, their length, the level of passion involved (measuring activity rate in “votes” per second), as well as visualizing the 100 longest discussions that did not result in the deletion of the article.

It’s a sort of “who watches the watchmen” scenario, rather than infosthetics just for the sake of it, and it’s great to see some analysis on the nature of how topics get deleted as well as reading, via the links, what goes on in these hotly debated discussions (for instance, a rejected article about Dead Playboy Playmates is “Interesting, yes. But not what an encyclopedia is for.”). Visit the project’s website to play around with the graphic and read more about how these discussions work.