Looking Outwards 07 – Notabilia

This week I’m discussing Moritz Stefaner’s “Notabilia”, a visual exploration of the most controversial corners of wikipedia. The diagram takes data from Wikipedia’s longest “deletion discussions”: arguments over whether to delete a page or not. Ranging from the absurd – “Object validity of Astrology” – to the hilarious – “List of similarities between Canada and New Zealand”.

Categorized into ‘the deleted’ and ‘the kept’, for whether the article in question was deleted or not, these threads visually show the rough, warped, messy work of distinguishing knowledge from misinformation. The artist managed to represent this highly abstract data in a comprehensible tangle, an impressive management of contradiction that makes it particularly interesting.

-Robert