Visualizing Science and Technology in Wikipedia
October 2nd, 2007
If you didn’t see our original Wikipedia Activity Visualization, check it out here (there’s a detailed explanation, as well). Also, there is a Google maps style zoomable version here.
This new version uses the same layout and images (well, slightly improved) as the original, but this time we tried to highlight activity in regions of Wikipedia that are predominately math or science or technology.
So we developed a program to classify Wikipedia articles as being one of these three categories (or none), based on the categories the article was assigned to and their positions in the Wikipedia category link network.
We were not surprised to see a tight cluster of math pages, in a region, I would add, which has little ‘hot’ activity. In fact, the only article in that region with lots of activity is the article “Earth”. It was also not surprising that technology articles are fairly spread out among the topics.
What’s striking is the science-related band (green-blue) that runs diagonal through the middle of the topic map. I won’t share my interpretation, but rather let those interested come up with there own. Hope you enjoy, please leave comments!
(CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE)
Above: The most actively edited science-related articles.
Left: Not much science here…a good indication the algorithms are working pretty well!
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:36 am
[...] em campos especÃficos deparei-me com uma “foto” da Wikipédia muito interessante, aqui, que ilustra, entre outras coisas, a actividade na Wikipédia, a vários nÃveis: Visualizing [...]
November 25th, 2010 at 5:00 am
Hi, I work as a teacher and ICT-advisor at a school in Sweden! I wonder if i can use this in a presentation about Wikipedia and collaboration?
Regards,
Per Falk
November 27th, 2010 at 4:43 pm
Hi Per Falk…sure, you can use the images.
Cheers,
Todd
January 23rd, 2011 at 9:21 am
Would you be willing to allow your “Visualizing Science & Tech Activity in Wikipedia” images to be used on Wikipedia?