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History Flow Shows How Wiki Articles Evolve

Posted by Zonk on from the shows-border-wars-between-wiki-thugs dept.

teslatug writes "IBM has released a preliminary alpha version of its History Flow Visualization Application that shows how collaboratively created documents evolve. The tool is written in Java and it's available for download along with plugins for MoinMoin and MediaWiki. They have some interesting screenshots of the Wikipedia articles on abortion, Brazil, and love."

4 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Here's an Idea by great+throwdini · · Score: 5, Informative

    Instead of linking simply to the download page and the screenshots, give people a chance to RTFA and link to the History Flow Visualization Application's overview document.

  2. Heavy Metal Umlat by hatrisc · · Score: 5, Informative

    Heavy Metal Umlat is a very interesting look at the history of a Wiki page. Worth checking out.

    --
    I write code.
  3. svn blame by TrdrJoe · · Score: 3, Informative

    Tools like "svn blame" or "cvs annotate" are much more useful; they tell you who added each line of text in your file, when they checked it in, etc.).

    Still, these tools don't let you see the history of text that has been *deleted*. A visualization like "historyflow" could be useful there

  4. Re:Interesting but useful? by shadowmatter · · Score: 3, Informative

    From the Overview page on alphaWorks:

    The patterns revealed by History Flow Visualization show such information as spacing by date; occurrances of vandalism; authorship; growth; and persistence.

    It seems like a good tool for inspecting the history of a document at-a-glance, but you're right -- for more details, there is no substitute for a commit log.

    Could be useful, however, in environments such as CVS or Subversion across sets of files... Hmmm.

    - shadowmatter