Visualizing Co-Authorship Networks in Online Wikipedia

Abstract

The Wikipedia online user-contributed encyclopedia has rapidly become a highly popular and widely used online reference source. However, perceiving the complex relationships in the network of articles and other entities in Wikipedia is far from easy. We introduce the notion of using co-authorship of articles to determine relationship between articles, and present the WikiVis information visualization system which visualizes this and other types of relationships in the Wikipedia database in 3D graph form. A 3D star layout and a 3D nested cone tree layout are presented for displaying relationships between entities and between categories, respectively. A novel 3D pinboard layout is presented for displaying search results