Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi have put together an addictive visualization of real-time edits on Wikipedia, mapped across the world. Every time an edit is made, the user’s location and the entry they edited are listed along with a corresponding dot on the map.
Click here for the full visualization.
On the Wikipedia Recent Changes Map, edits can be viewed on 11 Wikipedia language versions, including English, German, Russian and Japanese. Every time an unregistered user edits a Wikipedia entry, his or her IP address is recorded and translated into an approximate location. The about section of the visualization explains that registered users don’t have associated IP information, so registered user edits are not shown on this map.
In a blog post about the map visualization, LaPorte and Hashemi note that the map was built with several libraries and services, including d3, DataMaps, and freegeoip.net, and that the “map listens to live feeds of Wikipedia revisions, broadcast using wikimon.” The map’s code is open source and available on GitHub.
Hat tip to Megan Geuss at Ars Technica and to Emily Badger at The Atlantic for highlighting LaPorte’s and Hashemi’s work.
More visualizations:
- Building collapse rescue efforts
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- Commuting Paris
- Visualization of the Week: A day in the life of a bus line
- Block-level electricity use in Los Angeles
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