Hi, I'm new to the list so I'd like use the occasion of this first post to the list to say hello to everyone and many thanks to the developers of the software! (which I'm also using for my http://upcycling.org project.) To answer the question, how to visualize wikipedia, the first qu. that comes to my mind is the following: What does Wikipedia consist of? First, someone might think of Software and Hardware: Computers, cables, etc.. I think Users and Content are the most important thing in a social context. What was first? The Hen or the egg ?? The easy answer might be: the GFDL and the idea for Wiki Software :) As I mentioned on my userpage http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Epic would be to visualize the Users Trust Network with a tool like graphviz. Unfortunately I haven't got the knowhow for this task. to get the data out of the specific userpages into graphviz syntax. It would probably need some advanced SQL querying knowhow, while I can only look at sql syntax and try to understand what was going on. This would show a lot of names of wikipedia Users and their expressed Trust amongst each other. Maybe it would show different groups of users who work together more often etc.. Another approach would be to pick a specific subject and visualize articles related to each other and Users related to Articles they've contributed to. Hope my ideas might be useful to anyone, Eric. -- .---------------------------------------------------------------------------. | eric.poscher | ..:: http://upcycling.org ::.. | | @epe.at | ··::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::·· | | | ··::Einfälle statt Abfälle::·· | `--------------------------------------------------------------------------'

On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 01:37:40PM +0200, Mathias Schindler wrote: I've written a small Perl-based tool (mwgraph), which can create a graph file from the article & category links in a mediawiki database. You can download the mwgraph tool here: http://debianlinux.net/wikicompany/ An example graph data file can be found here: http://debianlinux.net/wikicompany/wikicompany.dot.bz2 Mwgraph may be a bit tricky to setup, since it needs several Perl modules (see the Base.pm file for all the dependency URL's). Mwgraph is a side-project of the Wikicompany project (http://wikicompany.org), which will soon be officially announced. The Wikicompany project aims to create a free (GNU FDL) business directory containing: company profiles, job offers, products info, and other such things. The mwgraph tool creates persistent perl graph objects (so you don't have to re-create the adjacency list and other things each time) and can directly output a Dot file. I've only been using mwgraph on my own mediawiki DB's, so I don't know if it could scale to wikipedia's metrics. I've licensed the tool under the GNU GPL license, and would ofcourse welcome additions to it. One thing I'd like to add to it is a sort of shortest-path-to-the-top-category (eg. Categories), and output this info on a category/article page (for navigational/orientation purposes). Regards, Jama Poulsen http://debianlinux.net http://wikicompany.net