WikipediaVision is a visualization of edits to the English (and the German, French, Spanish, Swedish) Wikipedia, almost the same time as they happen. The idea came after seeing flickrvision and twittervision, both created by Dave Troy. WikipediaVision, however, was designed and implemented by me alone.
For each wikipedia edit I display a box with the title of the article, the summary of the edit (if the person who made it gave any summary), link to the changes that were made to the article, geographical location of the wikipedia user and the time the edit happened. Additionally, if you click the link of the active language on the bottom of the page, a list appears with the most recent edits. The pop-up box can be hidden by moving the mouse cursor away. Additionally some charts can be viewed with a rough estimate of the amount of activity on Wikipedia. Here is a snapshot of the latest edits.
There is a public page on wikipedia that is automatically updated and contains all the recent edits, as well as the user name or IP address of anyone who edits an article.
There are open APIs for translating IP addresses to their corresponding geographical locations, such as hostip.info or GoNew's IP to country service for online geolocation. Currently I am using a database available from MaxMind.
No. They are just as accurate as the services above. Some of the locations can be mistaken, for some addresses only the country name is found, for others the location can not be found at all.
No. First of all, edits on wikipedia happen at a faster rate, than what is comfortably readable, so I have to skip some of them. Second, a good part of the edits are done by registered users. Their IP address is protected by wikipedia, therefore I could only display anonymous edits. Thirdly, those edits, where the IP address could not be located are skipped. Fourth, edits that are similar or identical to recent edits are often skipped. This still leaves more than enough to be visualized.
No. There are many biases introduced. We only see anonymous edits. We only see edits from IP addresses that could be located. If the location found is very generic (such as European Union), then it is not visualized at all. Hopefully WikipediaVision still captures a general sense of what people are thinking about all over the world.
For displaying the map I use the Google Maps API, for the charts I use the Google Chart API, for displaying the javascript pop-up box I use Walter Zorn's tooltip library, for displaying the labels on the snapshot map I use the ELabel extension. A big thanks to the creators of all these services. Additionally, I am grateful to Wikimedia Sweden for their technical help regarding the running of WPV.
While I made WikipediaVision only for fun, hosting and maintaining it requires some time and money, therefore I will greatly appreciate any donation. By sending a small monetary gift through PayPal you encourage me to continue working on WikipediaVision and other similar projects.
(I get a tiny percentage through the Amazon affiliate program and there is no extra cost to you). Some books I found interesting recently are listed on the front page.
Contact me and maybe we can work out something. If you want to hire me (part-time), I can design similar visualizations, as well as other web-based stuff, Google Maps related or otherwise. Regarding this visualization, in the future I might turn it into an open API to let people visualize their own stuff or release the whole thing under an open source license. As I'm busy with other projects as well, that might or might not happen. For more info, see here.
László Kozma, I am a grad-student at the Helsinki University of Technology. If you want more info about me, my projects, or want to contact me, check out my page or write to LKozma@gmail.com .