Thursday, October 16, 2008

A new live-data version of WikiDashboard for Wikipedia



The ASC group (and Bongwon Suh in particular) is pleased to announce a new version of WikiDashboard for Wikipedia. In this new version, we have:

* Live Information!
WikiDashboard now uses the live feed of English Wikipedia powered by MediaWiki Toolserver. The dashboard will show any changes made on each page almost instantly. Note that the earlier version has been showing information as of April 2008. For example, you can see who's been active in pages such as: Sarah Palin's page or the US President Election page.

Notice in particular how Sarah Palin's edits really only picked up in the last 6-8 weeks, but User Ferrylodge had edited her page around July 1, before the Aug. 29th nomination.

Unfortunately, because the Toolserver is not very reliable on our queries, we are not always able to serve up live edit data in our dashboard. If you don't get a live dashboard, you can either get at the data from April 2008 that is on our own private database server, or you can wait a while and try again.

* Browse Through Time
Now, you can click on the bars in the dashboard. Clicking on an bar will bring you to the wiki historical context when the edits were made. For Article Dashboard, the system will show all the edits made on the page around the time point you choose. For User Dashboard, WikiDashboard will provide a list of edits that the user made around the time you clicked.

Please let us know if you find any problem or have any feedback. Thanks!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Awesome! I've been waiting for this since I heard the latest database dump from Wikipedia had been released.

Ed H. Chi said...

Awesome to hear that you will be enjoying the new version. Let us know if you run into problems or have comments.

Anonymous said...

I looked at this for the Wikipedia entry on Bullis Charter School. The timeline is particularly useful there to put the entry in context of outdated political issues. In the case of our little school, all it's press was about town politics instead of it's educational approach. Best would be if we updated the entry. But at least people can see how old it is and form opinions accordingly.

Micke said...

This is realy cool, do you have any plans to add support for other languages as well? I'd love to see this for the swedish version, for example.

http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Ed H. Chi said...

We have had various request for French, German, Swedish, etc. But it's on the back burner, as it takes several days to get things working and commitment to have it remain working.

Ed H. Chi said...

We have just been covered by MIT TechReview.

Blog coverage at places like: here.

Anonymous said...

Other languages would interest me too.

If you don't have the time for other versions than en.wiki, you could always release the code. Wiki-community could host all versions which are deemed necessary.

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