[Wikimediaindia-l] A History of the World in 100 Seconds (according to Wikipedia)

[Achal Prabhala]

This visualization - 'A History of the World in 100 Seconds' - is 
fascinating. And instructive. (The missing byline is that it's a history 
of the world according to Wikipedia). Apologies for cross-posting and/or 
if you've seen it before - it seems to have been made about 2 months ago.

 From the makers: "Many wikipedia articles have coordinates. Many have 
references to historic events. Me (@godawful) and Tom Martin 
(@heychinaski) cross referenced the two to create a dynamic 
visualization of Wikipedia's view of world history. Watch as empires 
fall, wars break out and continents are discovered.

This won "Best Visualization" at Matt Patterson's History Hackday in 
January, 2011. To make it, we parsed an xml dump of all wikipedia 
articles (30Gb) and pulled out 424,000 articles with coordinates and 
35,000 references to events. Cross referencing these produced 15,500 
events with locations. Then we mapped them over time."

On the video's vimeo page, there are a whole lot of interesting comments 
- like this one: "so cool! really incredible how euro-centric it is. i 
wonder what it would look like if events were weighted by their 
appearance in the non-english wikipedias?"

More here: http://africasacountry.com/2011/04/06/a-history-of-the-world/

And here: http://vimeo.com/19088241

Cheers,
Achal