Simple Complexity

Visualizing Wikipedia - the ‘Power Struggle’

I am particularly interested in visualizations that convey information pertaining to constantly changing and evolving networks. Over the past 5-10 years, the Internet has become a fantastic tool for peer to peer collaboration and networking, with Wikipedia becoming a huge player… providing layman’s definitions while simultaneously inciting controversy over it’s methods of user-provided information.

I found an interesting visualization created by Bruce Herr and Todd Holloway of Indiana University. Read an article written about the technique at newscientist.com

Todd Holloway explains the visualization a little more technically…

…large circles indicate that an article might be controversial, or the subject of lots of vandalism, or just a topic whose content frequently changes.

The image used for each tile was selected automatically, simply by using the first image in the most linked to article among all the articles in that tile.

Our hope for this visualization approach, which we continue to improve on, is that it could be updated in real time to give a macro sense of what is happening in Wikipedia.

Here’s a great specific example of this visualization technique in use:

Top 20 Most Hotly Revised Articles:

Jesus, Adolf Hitler, October 2003, Nintendo revolution, Hurricane Katrina, India, RuneScape, Anarchism, Britney Spears, PlayStation 3, Saddam Hussein, Japan, Albert Einstein, 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake, New York City, Germany, Muhammad, Pope Benedict XVI, Ronald Regan, Hinduism

Posters of their Wikipedia visualizations can be purchased here.

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