WikipediaVision Snapshot
When WikipediaVision debuted in the fall of 2007, techies were enthralled with the concept. By combining Wikipedia’s recent changes feed with Google Maps, the site is a 2D visualization of all location-based service edits – and the results are mesmerizing. MyCityWay spoke with its creator, Laszlo Kozma, about his inspiration for the site and how it reflects on our global society.
What inspired you to create WikipediaVision?
At the time I made it, I was very interested in mash-ups – taking some data, transforming it, combining it with other data, and presenting it in a surprising way. Also, I had a lot of time to hack around on various small projects. The direct inspirations were FlickrVision and TwitterVision, two visualizations that seem to have gone inactive since. They were showing Twitter posts and Flickr image uploads on a map, more or less in real time. At first I was curious about the technical part – I thought a bit about how I would go about implementing such a thing, and it turned out not to be difficult at all. Then I started searching for different data sources to visualize, and I stumbled upon the Wikipedia page with recent changes. I put those two things together, and the end result was quite interesting, which surprised me the most.
What’s your favorite part about WikipediaVision?
I like to watch it for a while and enjoy the randomness of the edits. I love to discover new topics that I never heard about, and I sometimes find it amazing that people care about it enough to add some content. For example, there is an article called “List of unprovoked shark attacks in the United States”, and all of the edits WikipediaVision shows are done anonymously by the users. So you can’t even say people do it for fame or reputation – it’s just pure goodwill for the most part and a bit of obsessiveness. It is fun to imagine the people behind the edits and their stories. Once I saw someone at 3 in the morning in their time zone adding information about a minor character on an obscure 1970’s television show. Or there’s someone from Seattle editing an article on a village in southern Greece. Maybe someone who spent a holiday there, maybe a Greek intern at Microsoft. You can never know, of course.
Laszlo Kozma/www.lkozma.net
Have you noticed any trends in the data from WikipediaVision? Does one region tend to edit more?
Sure. The English version of Wikipedia seems to be edited a lot from the US, but during the day, activity shifts to other time zones rather predictably. At some point, most activity is from southeast Asia, at some point from Europe, and so on. Often you can see people editing something about their hometown or country, which is understandable. Then there are other patterns. For example, you can often see an article on some topic related to India being edited from a different country, in which there are many people of Indian origin.
A more surprising thing I found was that countries where Internet usage is less widespread than in the US, more often than not, people are editing highly technical articles such as higher mathematics, software engineering, theoretical physics, etc. I noticed this a few years ago, and it could be true to a lesser extent nowadays. The reason could be that in these countries, the Internet is still mostly used in universities or at software companies, rather than at home by the general public. Of course, there is a lot of editing that can be classified as vandalism. People delete the text of an article or try to insert a joke somewhere. The fact that Wikipedia self-heals and remains pretty usable for the most part still amazes me.
Have any results or data surprised you? Have there been any challenges to overcome?
At first, the vandalism surprised me. I didn’t expect there to be so much of it. But then I realized that there are two types of Wikipedia edits – those made by registered users and those by anonymous ones. The first group has their IP addresses hidden, so they are not shown on the map. Among anonymous edits, there seems to be more vandalism than among all edits, which is understandable.
There haven’t been many technical challenges. The implementation is pretty simple and straightforward, using free software and freely available services for fetching the data, looking up geographical addresses, etc. The first few weeks I was surprised by the amount of interest the site generated, and my server crashed a few times, but since then it’s all back to normal.
Do you have any upgrades or changes planned for WikipediaVision?
Not really. I try to fix bugs and keep it running, but otherwise I moved on to other projects. Some of my projects since WikipediaVision never took off, some found groups of interested users, but none of them seemed to appeal to such a wide range of people as WikipediaVision does.
What are some of your favorite websites and why?
Wow, where to start. I like Wikipedia and Google, of course. I like reddit.com, which is a forum for submitting links and discussing various topics. The main page is not as good as it used to be, but there are subtopics now for anything imaginable, and some of them have pretty good communities with a good outlook on life. I like to read blogs with well thought out posts on any topic – like Bruce Schneier, Paul Graham, Terence Tao, Venkatesh Rao (ribbonfarm.com), and idlewords.com. There are authors I enjoy, so I tend to read their stuff online as well – like Nassim Taleb and Edward Tufte. Wow, such strange combination of people I listed. I wonder what these guys would tell each other at a dinner table.
What are you working on now?
My day job is being a university researcher. I work on theoretical computer science, algorithms for solving geometric problems, that sort of thing. I have some smaller side projects that I hack on during the weekends sometime, but the problems that come up in my research work use up most of my thinking. Also, I’m a dad these days!
