Framing in Wikipedia

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Context

Wikipedia's neutrality policy requires that "mainspace articles and pages fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in the published, reliable sources." (Wikipedia:Neutral Point of View). However, articles at various points in time might deviate from this policy, potentially giving rise to a form of framing bias where certain aspects or viewpoints are given undue weight in the article.

Project

The project seeks to understand the framing of controversial topics in their respective Wikipedia articles over time by studying the revision history of those articles. The first part of the project would involve collection of the relevant revision histories and the second part would involve the analysis of the text through tools such as topic models.

Requirements

  • Strong coding skills in Python
  • Experience in text and NLP and probabilistic topic models a plus
  • Experience in Web scraping a plus

If interested, please send your CV and a transcript of your grades to aswin.suresh@epfl.ch.