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Wikiswarm: visualize Wikipedia page histories

A visualization of people who’ve contributed to the Barack Obama page on Wikipedia. People who edit a lot drift toward the center. Best watched full screen in HD on Vimeo

Made using code_swarm and my new Wikipedia page history parser Wikiswarm (Ruby), which uses the Wikipedia API to convert page edit histories into the code_swarm activity log format. There’s also experimental support for visualizing individual users’ contributions.

For info on how to generate your own wikiswarms read on…

Usage

Generate an activity.xml using wikipedia.rb:

$ ruby wikipedia.rb "Barack Obama" > activity.xml

It will also generate a merged log from multiple arguments:

$ ruby wikipedia.rb "Barack Obama" "John McCain" "Ron Paul" > activity.xml

And can produce a log of a users’ contributions, which fits the few-authors-many-files paradigm better:

$ ruby wikipedia.rb "User:Jamiew" > activity.xml

code_swarm

Get the code_swarm app installed and working:
http://code.google.com/p/codeswarm/

Config

code_swarm.wikipedia.config are the settings I used to generate the Obama video. It has edges turned on (which
turns the histogram off) and lower TTL for authors.

In a code_swarm install with wikiswarm in a subdirectory you can do something like:

$ ruby wikiswarm/wikipedia.rb "Barack Obama" > data/activity.xml
$ ./run.sh wikiswarm/code_swarm.wikipedia.config

Comment on this

  1. Your all-up RSS feed is br0kz0r3d

    — islandzero · Nov 7, 02:55 PM · #

  2. Thanks for the heads up, feed is fixed now

    — jamiew · Nov 10, 10:44 AM · #

  3. Spam catcher on the fritz, direct comments to http://fffff.at/visualizing-obama-wikipedia-page-edits

    — jamiew · Nov 10, 12:08 PM · #

Commenting is closed for this article.