László Kozma

Three ideas for Wikipedia visualizations [more ideas]

The idea of visualizing the geographic locations of anonymous editors in real-time led to WikipediaVision. Today I saw Google Maps' new feature of overlaying Wikipedia article extracts and images from the Panoramio collection. This is quite a nice feature. Links are:

http://maps.google.com
Panoramio
A similar service is Wikimapia


Another interesting approach I saw was John Winn's idea of visualizing the age of different parts of a Wikipedia article, which is likely to correlate with the reliability of the content.


All these different stimuli started a flurry of wikipedia visualization ideas, of which I list three here. Unfortunately, at this point I am unable to execute them due to a lack of time, but if I still find them relevant, and no-one else does it earlier, I might try them later.


1. Visualize the locations from which an article was edited
I choose an article, and I see a visualization on the map of the history of the article, showing from what location each anonymous edit was made. Visualization could indicate the time of the edits or the number of edits that were made from a location/region. Summaries of the edits could be indicated as well, to give a hint of the content, or if the edit was just vandalism. Interesting social phenomena could be visualized this way, similarly to the google trends service.

2. Indicate on mouse-over for every word of an article "who added it". This would be a Wikipedia viewer, possibly a browser plugin, or a different site fetching and serving wikipedia articles. While reading the article, if I hover the mouse cursor above some text, it would display in a pop-up, who added the text. (name of user if registered, otherwise geographical location based on IP address, such as "Anonymous from Helsinki, Finland on 15th August 2005"). In the same time it could highlight other parts of the text added by the same user. This could be in some cases a helpful hint on whether the content should be trusted or not (especially on controversial historical articles), and would show interesting social phenomena as well. This idea was inspired by John Winn's visualization described above.

3. Visualize every geographical location that appears in an article.
I select for example the article "Sándor Kôrösi Csoma", if the article is well written, it should contain that he was born in Transylvania, studied in Göttingen, traveled to Tibet, later lived in Calcutta and died in Darjeeling. All this could be extracted automatically and displayed on a map, with short captions of the text related to each location. This way nice posters could be generated automatically from many interesting articles.