Wikipedia Recent Changes Map | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia Recent Changes Map

rcmap.hatnote.com

163 pointsvinnyglennon36 comments

Although cool, this is something with a limited lifespan -- Wikipedia actually plans to break the ability to do this by masking IPs even for anonymous users. See: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IP_Editing:_Privacy_Enhancem...

Cannot blame them to be honest, many countries outside the US have privacy laws considering IP address to be personal information (notably EU's GDPR of course but also Canada's amended PIPEDA and Brazil's LGPD), and it's clear that Wikimedia really wants to steer clear of any controversies there.

Probably for the best. After removing vandalism from the page of a prominent political figure (not a president, just someone who was the focus of the news), someone posted my approximate location to the discussion page and accused me of "sock-puppetry" (for removing an effort to link said official's views to a fictional cult from a major TV show). They also tried to use it as proof that someone from one of the big 2 US political parties was editing the page, since I was near the political party's headquarters.

Honestly I'm surprised Wikipedia hasn't had a case like Reddit's harassment of innocent people after the Boston Marathon Bombings, given how tribal and jingoistic the most-active editors are.

It's pretty crazy how much of these edits are low quality, false, or just vandalism. Very impressive how the organization has been able to maintain such high quality information despite the general public.

> how much of these edits are low quality, false, or just vandalism

Regardless of the quality&vandalism - the name of the topic visited for review is in itself a valuable notification.

In the couple minutes I watched I was surprised that almost every edit I saw was either a sporting event or popular media (bands, albums, celebrities). I would have expected more diversity in changes especially considering that current state of the world and politics. The only update I noticed from the Ukraine site was from Kyiv and was a pop-band.

Could be users farming reputation. Interesting observation.

I'd wager it just reflects the most approachable, easy edits.

Imagine tweaking the page of your favorite Netflix show vs. making an edit to Covid-19 or Ukraine/Russia pages.

I've had Wikipedia random page as a browser starting page for years, and pages about sport (events or teams) and popular media are among the most common occurences. I believe those are just low hanging fruits for most Wikipedia contributors.

I'd really like to see the edits from american, ukrainian, russian and pretty much any balkan country from 1 february to today. Now that would be very interesting.

There used to be a project that could track all the changes made to a wiki page...great tool...wish it still existed... Was and would be very telling who is making changes to an article! Here is a Wired article about it: https://www.wired.com/2007/08/wiki-tracker/

You can view the recent changes to a wikipedia article page using the Related changes link under the Tools subheading on the left pane of the article page.

Here is an example from the page on Mikhail Gorbachev.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChangesLinked?hi...

You can also modify the filter to look at different period. (Not sure of the limits there on how far back you can go)

You can also click on the View history link at the top of the article page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mikhail_Gorbachev...

and the result page has a link to the oldest article version.

This is just for people who edit without logging in, which publicly saves the edit as your IP address. The overwhelming majority of people edit Wikipedia from an account.

We have a visualization like this for our own project. It actually involves a 3D globe you can rotate and explore and it is mobile friendly. You can see it here:

https://qbix.com/ecosystem

Click on the globe and explore different countries. You see those circles? They represent people using our apps around the world! The Wikipedia example gave me a lot more ideas though.

It hit me, any project could use this. We could make it a widget that people install on their own sites, and feed it with pings. The location is determined from the IP or fuzzed location from what people voluntarily enter in their app for other reasons.

Would love feedback and if anyone wants this on THEIR site for whatever app or site you currently own, I’ll give it to you. Just comment here and tell me how to reach out.

The edit-rate is perhaps lower than I expected? Feels like ~7-15/minute at 8-ish am Eastern time.

"When an unregistered user edits Wikipedia, he or she is identified by his or her IP address. These IP addresses are translated to users' approximate geographic location. Unregistered users only make a fraction of total edits -- only 15% of the contributions to English Wikipedia are from unregistered users. Edits by registered users do not have associated IP information, so the map actually represents only a small portion of the total edit activity on Wikipedia."

    s/unregistered/not logged in/

Registered users often don't bother with logging in.

I log in. Mostly for nostalgia, (I started the resilience wikipedia page and still regret doing it without an account!) but also for skipping the annoying pledge banners.

I'm not sure thats true since it's a policy violation (without proper disclosure) that is fairly regularly enforced when found

not really. logging out to do certain things is a violation, but simply editing logged out by itself is not a violation. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppetry#Legitim...

My mistake, though as i understand its still frowned upon, further down WP:LOGOUT says a little why

I log in, mostly so my IP doesn't get put on blast in the log.

I wouldn't say that's a common practice.

I always log in to edit, then log out.

I log in mostly for the custom CSS.

This is very cool! I've spotted some edge cases after watching edits for a while. If the IP lookup fails the user's location is 'undefined' and they get placed in the top left of the map, presumably at (0, 0). There's also a mismatch between supported location.

    Could not highlight country: undefined main.js:259:41
    Could not highlight country: Guernsey

This website doesn't let me use my browsers back button.

Works extremely well in Firefox.

Reminds me if the work from @lkozma in 2007, http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/

The title is misleading, I expected to see a map of the changes from the last hour/day/week/month but you just get a blank map at first. And then dots appear but they disappear after just a few dozen seconds which is not enough time to visualize any trend.

I was wondering if they meant a map of topics and recent edits. E.g. recent edits of US politicians' pages. I came, I saw the slow updates, and I didn't even stay long enough to see that those entries disappear.

Trivia: Just before Sarah Palin was named John McCain's running mate, there were plenty of edits to her Wikipedia page...

Misleading is a bit of a harsh judgment to pass when it's simply not what you expected; is that down to the title, or down to your own expectations?

I'd describe this as a "live map" not a "recent map"

Certainly not worthy of being called "misleading" but I would say it's misnamed

It seems weird to me that the dot disappears; wouldn't you want to see a heat map over time? It's a cool site which clearly just exists for the novelty of it but still, it seems weird to add a feature that makes the product worse

Dunno if I'd call it a product really.

It is an open source project though so feel free to fork it and make the change you're suggesting! Pretty sure doing so would just involve removing the call to .animate() that starts on line 238 in https://github.com/hatnote/rcmap/blob/master/static/main.js#...

This live-streaming list of topics being tended feels like an organic examination of genuine citizen interest as an alternative to the "no man's land" of politically corroded news feeds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com