Edit-History Vis: An Interactive Visual Exploration and Analysis on Wikipedia Edit History

We propose Edit-History Vis, a visual analytics system designed to facilitate interactive exploration on Wikipedia edit history at a fine-grained level. The examination of detailed changes in Wikipedia articles is crucial for understanding how authors’ perspectives vary and conflict during the collaborative editing process. However, it is challenging to reveal the details while preserving the heterogeneous attributes of revisions, namely the time, content, and editor. The Edit-History Vis system integrates editor and textual changes of revisions by utilizing a force-directed revision graph that groups revisions based on standpoints. Through this revision graph, users can identify and analyze editing events such as edit wars, vandalism, repair, and normal updates. The effectiveness of the system in analyzing the edit history is validated through a qualitative comparison with prior work and a quantitative rating from a user study.