whoVIS: Visualizing Editor Interactions and Dynamics in Collaborative Writing Over Time

Fabian Flöck, Maribel Acosta

Abstract: The visualization of editor interaction dynamics and provenance of content in revisioned, collaboratively written documents has the potential to allow for more transparency and intuitive understanding of the intricate mechanisms inherent to collective content production. Although approaches exist to build editor interactions from individual word changes in Wikipedia articles, they do not allow to inquire into individual interactions, and have yet to be implemented as usable end-user tools. We thus present whoVIS, a web tool to mine and visualize editor interactions in Wikipedia over time. whoVIS integrates novel features with existing methods, tailoring them to the use case of understanding intra-article disagreement between editors. Using real Wikipedia examples, our system demonstrates the combination of various visualization techniques to identify different social dynamics and explore the evolution of an article that would be particularly hard for end-users to investigate otherwise.