Emo, Love, and God: Making Sense of Urban Dictionary, a Crowd-Sourced Online Dictionary
Table 8: Familiarity, formality and offensiveness of UD definitions across rankings based on votes. Definitions for proper nouns and definitions annotated as opinions are not included. The table reports the proportions in each of the rankings for familiarity and formality and the average ranking for offensiveness (3=most offensive, 1=least offensive); n=2,991.
['[EMPTY]', '[BOLD] Familiar?  [BOLD] no', '[BOLD] Familiar?  [BOLD] yes', '[BOLD] Formal?  [BOLD] no', '[BOLD] Formal?  [BOLD] unclear', '[BOLD] Formal?  [BOLD] yes', '[BOLD] Offensiveness  [BOLD] avg. ranking']
We discard proper nouns and entries marked as opinion, since it is less clear what formality and familiarity mean in these contexts. We find that the top ranked definitions tend to be more familiar (χ2 (2, N = 2991) = 15.385, p <0.001) and more appropriate for formal settings (but n.s.). The difference in rankings between top ranked and second ranked definitions is minimal, but random definitions are more often ranked as being more offensive. A one-way ANOVA test confirms that the differences between the groups are highly significant (F(2, 2988) = 22.07, p<0.001). Post hoc comparisons using the Tukey test indicate significant differences between the random and top ranked, and random and second ranked definitions (p<0.001). A similar trend is observed when we consider all definitions (F(2, 3963) = 34.87, p<0.001). Thus, although UD contains offensive content, very offensive definitions do tend to be ranked lower through the voting system. However, the small difference in scores between the groups indicates that offensiveness only plays a small role in the up and down votes a definition receives.