Wikiswarm
Wikiswarm generates code_swarm visualizations from Wikipedia page histories and user contributions. It was a personal project that I cross-posted to FAT Lab.
The Project
Code_swarm is Michael Ogawa’s visualization tool, built in Processing at UC Davis to show the evolution of software projects through their commit history. Wikiswarm is a small Ruby script that pulls a page’s history from the Wikipedia API and writes it out as a code_swarm event log. It can visualize:
- How a Wikipedia article evolved over time
- Which editors contributed to a page
- Edit wars and periods of intense activity
Pass it several pages, like “Barack Obama” “John McCain” “Ron Paul”, and it merges them into one log. The README also shows a user mode, "User:Jamiew", for one person’s contributions, which fits code_swarm’s few-authors-many-files idea better. The code only ever fetched my own contributions, though: user_history hardcodes target=Jamiew.
Obama Wikipedia Page Edits
I wrote it on November 6, 2008, two days after the election, to visualize the people who edited Barack Obama’s Wikipedia page:
Users who edit a lot drift toward the center. The music is DJ Z-Trip’s Obama Mix. The README’s instructions end with “add rap music and enjoy!”
The video went up on the FAT Lab blog on November 7, and The Next Web wrote it up the same day. It also got listed in IDFA DocLab 2008, the interactive documentary program at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.
The last commit landed on November 19, 2008.
Links
2008