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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."

6 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting but useful? by thundercatslair · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This program is interesting to look at for a little while, but can it do anything useful? I don't really see a need to see the history of a wiki visually.

  2. As much by odano · · Score: 3, Insightful

    As much as I love visualizing things that aren't visual, it just doesn't seem like this application changed the data into anything useful.

    I have no idea what the evolution of those documents was before, and even after viewing the visualizations (and knowing what they mean), I still have no idea what it means about the document.

    1. Re:As much by FarHat · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Without the actual document, a graph such as this doesn't tell you anything. What it could tell you, along with the document that it is representing would be much of a document changes in any given time. Are there parts of the document that are essentially static. Parts that are static would be parts that there is little disagreement about. Parts that change a lot could be considered controversial. Heavy editing would indicate a lot of popular interest in the article, etc.

      --
      At the intersection of computation and biology.
  3. Re:MOD IBM -1 REDUNDANT ;-) by Stalyn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    poor Amsterdam Vallon... his posts are somewhat informative and interesting but are constantly being modded down because he asks people to think of Terri Schiavo when right now a lot of people can't stand her (well the media coverage).

    btw Amsterdam if thats your real name are you of any relation to Archimedes Plutonium?

    --
    The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
  4. It's based on diff format... by vhogemann · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So it might be used to show progress over time on open-source projects. It would be usefull to show progress over a single project or how two projects merged, and to show wich contribuitions made it to final versions, or witch developer has more code on it.

    It should be very interesting to see it applied to big projects, like the Linux kernel or the KDE project to see how it evolved from the number of contribuitions and devellopers, and to see how long each contribuition survived unnaltered on the source.

    It could prove to be a very usefull tool indeed.

    --
    ---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
  5. Ironic that this gets posted on Slashdot... by corporatemutantninja · · Score: 3, Insightful
    ...yet Slashdot passed on an opportunity to have something like this for themselves.

    The IBM researcher who created this software, Martin Wattenberg, also wrote some really cool tools for visualizing and navigating Slashdot threads. He said he would be happy to let Slashdot use them for free so I made an intro but the /. guys never followed up.

    --
    Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.