[WikiEN-l] "Articles of War" -- Wikipedia infographic

[William Beutler]

I'm working on a blog post about this, but here's an infographic from David
McCandless (who does some nice work, i.e. Information is
Beautiful<http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/>)
about Wikipedia edit wars. Full thing
here<http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/08/wikipedia-edit-wars.png>
.

At least it acknowledges its source is
WP:LAMEST<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars>,
which is intentionally humorous, but sure wasn't made with statistical
precision in mind. So he's done something else: it looks to the average
reader like 11,000 edits were spent on the subject of Freddie Mercury's
ethnic history in early 2002, but he's clearly taking the total number of
edits and that's the oldest record of the article on Wikipedia. It also
categorizes incidents glibly (or just inaccurately) listing Jimbo and
Wikipedia-related subjects as "Religion" -- and the question over which
Palin was more famous occurred in 2008 (which makes sense) not 2003 (which
doesn't) as it's listed in there.

Maybe I'm making too much of this, but while I think it's one thing for
Cracked or Something Awful to joke about Wikipedia, I think if you're
offering up visual representations of information, more care should be given
to accuracy. Erik Zachte does some great work -- it would be nice to see
more of that developed for visual interest of non-Wikipedians. That's
something else I've been thinking about, but I'm curious to hear what others
think.



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