[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Projects Growth Animated

[Erik Zachte]

This is a joyful day indeed.
I would first like to send my best wishes to Angela and Tim for getting engaged ☺
And Erik Moeller did an awesome job pitching Wikimedia at the Sloan foundation, congratulations!

I met Erik and GerardM two weeks ago, and we discussed all kind of interesting things. 
One of the topics we briefly touched was animated web stats, we all knew and admired Hans Rosling's wonderful Gapcasts.

I figured Wikimedia could benefit from similar stats.
Of course java or svg would be likely candidates for implementation, but both have their pro's and con's.
Also rather than going back to Hans' (and now Google's) GapMinder, I thought to do some experimentation myself.

Upcoming html5 promises exciting, albeit not yet standardized, new functionality.
The new canvas element was introduced first in Safari, but Firefox 3 takes it a few steps further.

So for now my javascript-only 'Wikimedia Projects Growth Animated' runs only on Firefox 3 (beta).
Be assured there is also a recorded 8 Mb Flash file for project Wikipedia.
The idea is to update these animations automatically from the wikistats job.

http://www.infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/Wikistats/

Erik Zachte