Collaborative Visualizations for Wikipedia Critique and Activism

Wikipedia is one of the largest platforms based on the con- cept of asynchronous, distributed, collaborative work. A systematic collaborative exploration and assessment of Wik- ipedia content and coverage is however still largely missing. On the one hand editors routinely perform quality and cov- erage control of individual articles, while on the other hand academic research on Wikipedia is mostly focused on global issues, and only sporadically on local assessment. In this paper, we argue that collaborative visualizations have the potential to fill this gap, affording editors to collaboratively explore and analyse patterns in Wikipedia content, at differ- ent scales. We illustrate how a collaborative visualization service can be an effective tool for editors to create, edit, and discuss public visualizations of Wikipedia data. Com- bined with the large Wikipedia user-base, and its diverse lo- cal knowledge, this could result in a large-scale collection of evidence for critique and activism, and the potential to en- hance the quantity and quality of Wikipedia content.