[Wikipedia-l] IBM releases history flow tool

[Sj]

On Sat, 26 Mar 2005 01:59:30 +0100, Erik Zachte <e.p.zachte at chello.nl> wrote:
> > once we confirm that a few thousand people using this to
> > suck out WP histories won't thrash the servers.
> 
> The charts are beautiful. yet I think it would be overdone to generate them
> on demand for every article.
> After you've seen a few you've seen them all. They give a general impression
> of how fluid popular and/or contested articles are, but are too crowded for
> detailed analysis.

Hmm.  If you have access to the tool itself, you are able to
effectively browse the article text at each revision, in combination
with the visual overview, in quite an effective way.
So having a local copy of the full history flow, with the interface
tool, is certainly useful for all articles.

As for generating snapshots for each article; certainly on-demand
wouldn't be very interesting.  But see for instance these 100
revisions of the "Evolution" article from 2003, miniaturized to a
width of 200px.   That suffices to tell you how much of the article
was written by one person, when the last sea-change in article content
occurred, and whether or not there have been significant
reversion-wars or blankings or size changes over the past few dozen
edits.
  
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/IBM_releases_free_software_for_visualizing_document_histories

> For me a limited set of pregenerated charts for say 50 selected articles,
> refreshed once a month, would be sufficient.

Which 50?  For what purpose? 

-- 
+sj+