The "Wikipedia live monitor" tool was designed by Thomas Steiner http://research.google.com/pubs/author39477.html, an engineer of Google Germany, with the intention of identifying breaking news stories. This tool was mentioned in the *Signpost *in 2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-04-22/In_the_media but this is the first that I can recall seeing it, and it's not in my mailing list archives so I'm forwarding the links in case list subscribers are interested.
https://wikipedia-live-monitor.herokuapp.com/
https://twitter.com/wikilivemon
Pine