Slashdot Mirror
History Flow Shows How Wiki Articles Evolve
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."
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.
the rapid spike in my documents before their deadline.
Can any tell if there is going to be an earthquake soon?
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.
Heavy Metal Umlat is a very interesting look at the history of a Wiki page. Worth checking out.
I write code.
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.
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
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
"I'm a Wikipedia editor by night..."
"Please keep Terry and those who love her in your prayers"
So much for non-POV.
It's how people greet in Northern Germany (especially Bremen). I guess it comes from "Morgen" (morning), but people say "moin-moin" pretty much all the time.
:)
Thank you for your attention
Doomie
There is no MediaWiki plugin available atm.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
A guy loads the Heavy Metal Umlat page v1.0 and steps through the hundreds of versions while talking in a nerdy voice and laughing about attempts at using unicode and LaTeX for rendering the band name Spinal Tap. He provides a near monotone commentary to what is very obviously changing in the page. "Oh, look at that, someone added something. Fascinating."
That was neither interesting, nor worth checking out, and I hold you personally responsible for the 5 minutes of my life I wasted on it.
Please help metamoderate.
My own interest would be in visualizations that identify zealots of various stripes violating the basic neutral POV philosophy. Something that would show the behavioral similarities in their behavior. I must be too interested in deviant behavior? For example, there was some recent ruckus about the "online poker" entry, where some commercial zealot was trying to use Wikipedia as free advertising to flog his poker Web sites. Before that, I remember a similar incident involving a religious crazy who wanted to use Wikipedia to manufacture some credibility for his cult. I'm sure there must be some tranplanted Newsgroup Charlies wandering around Wikipedia, too. (Don't look at me--I'm just a harmless grammar Nazi.)
In practical terms, if you can identify patterns associated with such problematic behavior, it will make it much easier to create automated alarms to help people notice. However, I'm kind of skeptical about the idealistic approach of trusting people's common sense. I'm given to understand that the Simpsons is a popular program, but it is so profoundly anti-intellectual that I can't stand it at all. Then consider some of Dubya's knuckle-dragging supporters and their primitive belief systems...
Never underestimate the power of organized knuckle-dragging.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
These visualisations are quite neat. I've often wanted a word processor that would be able to do something like this. I tried writing on a private wiki at one point, but it still presents the changes between different versions very separate and discrete from each other, and from the editing, so it didn't work terribly well.
When I write things, the text often evolves a lot over several days. I usually blurt out everything I want to say at the beginning, and then go back and edit it over and over again until it's expressed how I want it. One problem, though, is that when I go away and come back again, it's not always obvious which parts are the most volatile, and might need the most attention. It often takes a while to get back into the right mode of figuring out where the complicated parts are, and editing the document.
Writing on paper is still very different from a word processor. It's very obvious where a lot has been crossed out and changed over and over again, and previous crossed-out versions, even if they're on paper that's been put aside, are often still visible and easily accessible during the rest of the process. In a word processor, though, nearly all of this contextual information is lost. At best it's possible to "track changes", and that particular tool is relatively simple and usually aimed at being able to see some one-off changes that someone else has made to your document.
Beyond just tracking changes, which is a very linear representation, I'd love to be able to have some kind of visual representation surrounding the text to indicate the stability of different sections of what I've been writing.
Some useful ideas might perhaps include different coloured backgrounds to represent the volatility of sections of text, blocks of text that get moved a lot, being able to quickly flip back to what a small section used to be (without necessarily committing to it), and so on. Perhaps even a draft mode that shoves text aside (maybe above or below), but still leaves it accessible while editing the replacement text.
As a writing tool, it'd be a very helpful extension to any of the open source word processors out there. I bet there's a great niche market in authoring tools that current word processors really don't cater to right now.
One step closer to objectively identifying who the wiki trolls are :-) What color of lines do they use for trolls? Toad green?
Table-ized A.I.
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
I may have misunderstood you or what you mean by anti-intellectual, but personally I've found The Simpsons to be, by far, one of the most insightful shows on TV. Once you look past the humour and the sometimes really bad (occasionally pathetic) joke, especially in more recent episodes, it's a very good satirical commentary on society. It's also not afraid to make fun of itself, and it does so frequently.
If you have an opportunity, I highly recommend Planet Simpson, by Chris Turner. He's a self-confessed Simpsons fan and goes off on tangents a little from time to time, but otherwise I found it to be a very good analysis of The Simpsons and the multitudes of hidden satire of today's society that makes it such a well thought out show.
Clearly the show's not for everyone. If you don't like it then good for you for not watching it. But anti-intellectual is something that The Simpsons definitely isn't, and I think it's short-sighted to call it such. It has stacks more depth and thought put into it than most other relatively shallow content on TV.
Martin Wattenberg, being the main author, also has a personal homepage that has very interesting visualisations in Java as well: Bewitched
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
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.
It's strange, he's a troll who actually contributes to the discussion at hand.
It's not strange. He just includes seemingly insightfull elements to his trolls as a distraction. People might mod him up absent mindedly without realising that aside from the on-topic element, the post was a troll.
Wikipedia explains it.
I'd like to see the graphic for the changes of THAT page. I bet it's the target of many a troll who'd rather keep their behaviour undocumented.
You can't take the sky from me...