Visualizing the Wikipedia Power Struggle 174
todd450 pointed us to a nifty
visualization of Wikipedia
and controversial articles in it. The image started with a network of 650,000 articles color coded to indicate activity. The original image is apparently 5' square, but the sample image they have is still pretty neat.
"Steal"? (Score:5, Informative)
[John]
Mirror of Sorts (Score:5, Informative)
http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/visual/projects
The Slashdotted Article (Score:3, Informative)
[abeautifulwww.com]A new visualization Bruce Herr and I recently completed is being featured in this weeks New Scientist Magazine (thearticle [newscientist.com]is free online, minus the viz). They did a good job jazzing up the language used to describe the vizpower struggle, bubbling mass, blitzed articlesbut they also dumbed down the technical accomplishments. I guess not everyone gets as excited about algorithms as I do.Before I talk anymore about the viz, though, let me mention its appearing at the NetSci 2007 Conference [indiana.edu]this week, and hopefully a varient will appear at Wikimania [wikimedia.org] later this summer as well. The viz is a huge 5 feet by 5 feet when printed, and I only include a low res, smaller version here. At some point high qualityart prints of it will appear at SciMaps [scimaps.org]for sale to fund further visualization research.
[abeautifulwww.com]Now for the good stuff. Much like my visualization of the netflix prize competition data [abeautifulwww.com], we began this piece byrepresenting the dataas a network. In this case the nodes in the network are wikipedia articles and theedges are thelinks between articles. We then (with some help from our friends at Sandia) used an algorithm to lay out all 650,000nodes (wikipedia articles) that had at least one link in such a way that similar articles are near one another. These are the yellow dots,which when viewed at low res give a yellow tint tothe whole picture.
The sizes of the nodes (circles, dots, whatever you want to call them), are based on a model of revision activity. So large circles indicate that an article might be controversial, or the subject of lots of vandalism, or just a topic whose content frequently changes. We labeled only the largest nodes, to keep it readable. Thereis an interactive version of this in the works based on the google maps platform which will change the labels and pictures used as the user zooms in or out. Stay tuned for that.
The image used for each tilewas selected automatically, simply by using the first imagein the most linked to article among all the articles inthat tile.We were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the images that appeared.
Our hope for this visualization approach, which we continue to improve on,is that it could be updated in real time to give a macro sense of what is happeing in Wikipedia. I personally hope that some variation of it will end up in high schools as a teaching tool and for generating discussions.
Yet another example (Score:4, Informative)
This one is less pretty with colours, but way more informative...
Network Mirror of the site (Score:5, Informative)
70%"Flamebait"?They're deadly afraid of the truth! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The two sides of Wikipedia (Score:2, Informative)