[Wikipedia-l] IBM releases history flow tool

[Andre Engels]

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.

I don't agree. They could be used to check whether significant
portions of the article have been deleted, to see whether a an article
is basically one person's work or patched up from different authors,
and to faster get a list of the 'main authors' than can be gotten
through the history.

I would thus want this to be available for all articles with certain
properties (more than 3 authors or more than 10 revisions, for
example, or maybe simply all articles), updated if the last request is
more than one week old. It would be even better if we had enough
machines to have a backup of the database (updated weekly) on one or
two machines, which then could be used for information like this,
searching, maintenance page, the more difficult special pages, and
perhaps even direct SQL queries.

Andre Engels