WiGipedia: Visual Editing of Wikipedia
Recently, large numbers of Wikipedia users have collaborated to produce more structured information in the online encyclopedia. For example, the information found in tables, categories and infoboxes. Infoboxes contain key-value pairs, manually appended to articles based on the unstructured text therein. WiGipedia is a web based interactive visualization tool designed to simplify the elicitation of semantically structured information from the average Wikipedia user, and to boost the consistency of structured Wikipedia information, thereby supporting better visual analytics and more complex SQL-like querying. While many automated approaches for inferring semantic relations over the infobox ontology have been proposed, we argue that without significant contributions from large numbers of users, real growth of the knowledge base is limited. By leveraging structured data in DBpedia, we generate an interface which is embedded on every Wikipedia article as an interactive graph visualization of a collection of entities with typed connections between them. The interface supports single-click editing of structured information in Wikipedia and dynamic infobox attribute suggestions from a range of sources.
Data Flow with WiGipedia
Usage Scenario
The figure highlights the steps in the process flow of WiGipedia. For Bob, a casual Wikipedia user, the interaction experience occurs as follows: Bob searches Wikipedia for an article of interest, for example, details on his favorite band, Led Zeppelin. The article page shows the standard wiki text descriptions, and an infobox containing a picture with some facts about the band. In addition to the infobox, Bob notices a graph with nodes and edges embedded in the wiki page, as shown in (a). The graph contains nodes representing Led Zeppelin and a range of other contextually relevant information such as music genres, English rock groups, musical quartets, and a selection of similar bands, e.g. Pink Floyd and Deep Purple. Bob highlights a few nodes and notices that he can move them around to reconfigure the entire graph layout into different configurations. When he is satisfied with his layout, Bob then notices that all three bands on the periphery of the graph are linked to the node ”English rock music groups”, but only two of them are linked to ”England”. Bob decides to create a link between the nodes ”Pink Floyd” and ”England” and a suggestion box appears above the graph, as shown in (c). The box contains a dropdown list of recommendations for the edge label, and a text box. Bob clicks on “Origin” and a labeled edge appears on the graph. Bob also notices that the Wikipeidia article infobox has changed, and that the text “England” has appeared and is highlighted in yellow, alongside a green check mark and a red X. Bob clicks on the green check mark and confirms his Wikipedia update. In a similar fashion, Bob can remove or update existing edges, either from the suggestion interface or though free text for addition of new parameters.
Graph Generation
