As many of you know, the Wikimedia Foundation has an Audit Committee which represents the Board in oversight of financial and accounting issues, including planning, reporting, audits, and internal controls. The Committee typically serves for one year, roughly from July through the late Spring when the Foundation files its annual tax return in the U.S. This past year the committee included members from the broad community, from chapters, and from the Foundation’s Board (including me as Committee Chair).
Web Seer
A few months ago two data artists, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, released a beautiful visualization tool that uses Google Suggest to create an addictive way to explore the world’s searching. I came across this while looking at their 2003 project, History Flow, about visualizing edits to Wikipedia. The example below shows Google’s suggestions to complete the phrases “are diets…” and “is chocolate…”, with the size of arrows and words showing Google’s count of how many web pages address each completed question.
Map of Wikipedia usage worldwide
Last week I did a short talk at TED on Wikipedia’s evolving impact. I’ve posted an expanded version of the slides (PDF) and want to use a few blog posts to elaborate on some of the points covered.
First point for this blog post, I was looking for a way to visualize some the great analysis Erik Zachte did recently on the geographic source of traffic to Wikipedia. A trip through Commons pointed me to a slick online mapping tool and Erik was incredibly helpful at providing me with the data I needed. Here’s the map we came up with, which represents average monthly Wikipedia page views per internet user during July, August and September of 2009:
OpenStreetMaps visualization
Tim Berners-Lee gave a talk at TED 2010 on the initiative to put more data on the web. As an example, he showed this beautiful video of OpenStreetMaps edits over the course of year. Wouldn’t it be great to have something like this for Wikipedia?
OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.
comScore January 2010 data
I updated the meta page on comScore data with January 2010 information. It’s been a while since I updated this analysis, mostly since Erik Zachte’s great Wikimedia Report Card covers most of the data far more elegantly.
I did include a first cut of the percentage of visitors to the largest language Wikipedias who actively edit, using Erik Zachte’s editor counts from WikiStats. A couple observations: