Show HN: Replay Edits – Visualize the edits in a Wikipedia article | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Replay Edits – Visualize the edits in a Wikipedia article

cosmiclattes.github.io

36 pointscosmiclattes9 comments

This is a cool project, but I found the UI to be so confusing that I couldn't use it. There are 2 timelines, I guess one zoomed in around the current position and one zoomed out, but clicking around in the first timeline doesn't seem to have any effect other than pausing? The timelines are going backwards from today to the creation of the article (I don't think I've ever seen a reverse timeline like this before, which makes it very confusing at first). The default speed is also very slow.

What I thought I was going to be able to is see a movie-like replay of the article being written, with some way to fast-forward to some point in time and maybe a way to set playback speed.

Going back now I see that time is actually flowing in the expected way (past to present) but going right to left (not the expected way, at least in western countries) which might explain why I was so confused.

Yes, the timelines are a bit confusing, the one on top is a zoomed in version of the one below. The one on top also shows also shows the time between the edits.

To show the change happening the tool fetches the html of every edit. So for a long article with a lot of edits it takes time to load the edits & to start the playback. There is a small slider that lets you control the speed of the playback.

This is a tool I built that visualizes the edits in a wikipedia article as a playback. I built it as part of the Wikimedia Foundation's IEG program.

Project Page: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Replay_Edits Source Code: https://github.com/cosmiclattes/wikireplay

Trying it on Firefox, I couldn't get anything to happen. Under Chrome, I did see some text come up, but nothing played. I suspect in the latter case it's waiting on Wikipedia resources, but it was hard to tell. I love the idea; perhaps a "please wait" or "buffering" or some similar thing would help?

I also agree that the timelines were backwards from what I expected. If you look at existing timelines, almost everything has earlier dates to the left:

https://www.google.com/search?q=timeline&hs=ijL&channel=fs&s...

I tested it on firefox & it works, I suspect you tried it on a long article in which case you'll have to wait a bit. I'll add a please wait/buffering as you suggested.

I think this is really cool! I heard that Bush's page has a lot of vandalism over time.

I wanted to show you what I saw for George W. Bush Jr. - that I had a hard time finding the changes that were happening. However, I found that the url never changes? Maybe you could update the browser location (and then even add a "share this" link?) so people can share particular pages?

Very neat. If I had a suggestion it would be to perhaps add a kind of 'focus' mode overlay that dimmed the rest of the page when highlighting changes so the eye knows where to look while the timeline is playing.

I've had other suggesting something similar too. Will add it to my todo.

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