On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 12:35:08 +0100, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 12:32:59 +0100, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 12:25:53 +0100, Nicolas Weeger nicolas.weeger@laposte.net wrote:
I think there was a research paper (from the MIT?), some months/years ago, that analysed how a specific article on Wikipedia was modified, showing the slow modifications over time and a few big changes.
This was the " history flow" study, and can be seen at http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/
Has there been contact with IBM about the possibility to use their work? For example, I think it would be interesting to create these diagrams for a large number of Wikipedia pages, and make those available.
Yes. Two weeks ago, I visited the group that did the history flow study, and spent a couple of hours talking to Martin Wattenberg about their interest in wikis and some of their ongoing projects.
I'll write more about this later tonight, but they are thinking about this -- one of them suggested the idea of running history flow on an article once a week and producing a little thumbnail that could appear next to the article title -- and working on providing the tool for others to use.
Jack Lutz wrote:
I emailed Martin Wattenberg about using an image in their paper and did not receive a response.
Which image was it?
The requested image was: http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/images/capitalism_group.gif Perhaps his spam filter caught it; the email was sent 15 February 2005 titled "Image permission request for Wikipedia".
Andre Engels wrote:
Has there been contact with IBM about the possibility to use their work? For example, I think it would be interesting to create these diagrams for a large number of Wikipedia pages, and make those available.
SJ wrote: | Yes. Two weeks ago, I visited the group that did the history flow | study, and spent a couple of hours talking to Martin Wattenberg about | their interest in wikis and some of their ongoing projects.
To continue: they have packaged up a history flow tool that they are planning to release soon for anyone to use. (Sadly, the code won't be open source.) That should help people extract statistics from MediaWiki databases, and generate their own images, like the one Jack was hoping to get permission to add to WP.
They like the idea of people building useful tools on top of this. For instance, something which uses their sentence-by-sentence diff engine to estimate how old each sentence of an article is, or what % of the article was contributed by each user in its history. I think it would be fun to work out a way to generate weekly stats with such a tool; even if it had to be done on an off-site machine from the latest dump.
--SJ++
PS - Jack, I sent another request about that history image; we'll see if there's any response.
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