Delphine Ménard wrote: Why not just ask emijrp -- it's his script. Anyway, the animation is done in JavaScript, so you can just look at the source to see what it's doing. The relevant part is var editinit=997162411; var timeinit=1271109001000; var timenow=new Date().getTime(); var period=1000/10; // period update in miliseconds var editrate=0.010; //per milisecond The editinit and timeinit values increase when you reload the page, as one might expect. I haven't seem any change in the editrate value, but that could be either because it's just pulled out of a hat (it does look suspiciously round) or because it's a long-term average. It probably wouldn't be too hard to write a better "real-time" edit counter. For example, one could make it do an AJAX request back to to server, say, every minute or so to adjust the rate to match reality. Also, making the intervals between increments Poisson-distributed would look more realistic that having them stay constant, although of course the individual "edits" would still be fake. In principle, it should also be possible to make a true live Wikimedia edit counter: all you'd need to do is subscribe to the IRC RecentChanges feed and condense it down to some suitably low-bandwidth, low-latency format for transmitting to the browser. I'm not sure how practical that would be with plain old AJAX, though (you really don't want to make a new request for every edit), but Java or Flash or something like that ought to handle it fine. -- Ilmari Karonen