A general observation of the political landscape is that some politicians from certain countries tend to draw a disproportionate amount of attention in the mass media. In addition to that, it is also observed that there are usually more male politicians than female politicians. These observations inspired us to investigate whether similar phenomena occur in Wikipedia, which has a large number of pages containing the biographies of politicians (approximately 70,000).

The goal of this project is to provide a meaningful visualization and analysis of politicians in the English Wikipedia. The end user should be able to interact with the network graph, colored either based on nationality or gender, as well as apply additional filters based on nationality and year of birth of politicians. This is complemented by network analysis which helps to describe certain properties of the politician network in Wikipedia.

Social scientists, academic researchers, political analysts, students

10 Master Web Science students in the University of Koblenz-Landau, under the supervision of Junior Professor Dr. Claudia Wagner.

Project life cycle duration is approximately 6 months. The project team of 10 students was divided into subgroups; UI/UX team, Network Analysis team, as well as Wikipedia and DBpedia parsing team. Facebook and Basecamp are the main media of internal communication in addition to regular face-to-face team meetings.

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