Auditing Wikipedia’s Hyperlinks Network on Polarizing Topics Cristina Menghini Aris Anagnostopoulos Eli Upfal DIAG DIAG Dept. of Computer Science Sapienza University Sapienza University Brown University Rome, Italy Rome, Italy Providence, RI, USA
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT readers to deepen their understanding of a topic by conveniently ac- People eager to learn about a topic can access Wikipedia to form cessing other articles." Consequently, while reading an article, users a preliminary opinion. Despite the solid revision process behind are directly exposed to its content and indirectly exposed to the the encyclopedia’s articles, the users’ exploration process is still content of the pages it points to. influenced by the hyperlinks’ network. In this paper, we shed light Wikipedia’s pages are the result of collaborative efforts of a com- on this overlooked phenomenon by investigating how articles de- mitted community that, following policies and guidelines [4, 20], scribing complementary subjects of a topic interconnect, and thus generates and maintains up-to-date and high-quality content [28, may shape readers’ exposure to diverging content. To quantify 40]. Even though tools support the community for curating pages this, we introduce the exposure to diverse information, a metric that and adding links, it lacks a systematic way to contextualize the captures how users’ exposure to multiple subjects of a topic varies pages within the more general articles’ network. Indeed, it is im- click-after-click by leveraging navigation models. portant to stress that having access to high-quality pages does not For the experiments, we collected six topic-induced networks imply a comprehensive exposure to an argument, especially for a about polarizing topics and analyzed the extent to which their broader or polarizing topic.