Wikipedia’s global edits

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Erik Zachte is at it again, with a blog post announcing his fascinating new visualization of all the global edits to Wikipedia in a single day (Valentine’s Day, a romantic choice).  It’s an incredible tool and worth a look — I just spent 30 minutes wandering around its different views, zooming in on different regions, and drinking it in.  See below for my favorite screenshot so far, which shows the locations from which all the edits to Wikipedia were made that day.

This reminds me of one of my favorite visualizations, a video with OpenStreetMap edits over a single year.

Call for volunteers — 2010-2011 Audit Committee

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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).

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Web Seer

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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.


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Map of Wikipedia usage worldwide

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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:


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