I saw Nihiltres spouting off about how wonderful is the visualization work of Chris Harrison at Carnegie-Mellon.

Thing is, how does something like this actually help human understanding of Wikipedia?

I also note something Chris Harrison says on his web page:

Except for the period and the comma, the apostrophe is the smallest glyph in the ASCII character set. Some of you may also recall that the apostrophe was the shortest non-null reason ever posted in a log to explain an administrative action. When Jimbo deleted the pages in my userspace on Wikiversity, he posted as his reason the 1-character entry consisting of the apostrophe character.

In Greek Theater, "apostrophe" is a stage direction that means "turning away" (meaning that the actor, who normally faces the Greek Chorus, should turn away, as if they are thinking out loud with no one listening). It's the equivalent of a "thought bubble" in the comics.

Perhaps by posting the apostrophe, Jimbo intended to signal that he was turning away from my posted objectives of promoting accuracy, excellence, and ethics in online media.

The punctuation, grammar, and word usage in that article stink. But I find the data visualization interesting. It's not just Wikipedia, you know. He also creatively visualized data from Digg, Google, Amazon, and the Bible.

In my experience, there are few academics who study Wikipedia. Instead, most papers written about Wikipedia tend to treat it as an interesting data set for this or that (e.g., visualization). Wikipedia as such is not a particularly interesting thing to study, and only a few people have really looked at it that way.

http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/wiki...15025030k3p.jpg

*chortle*

Ten years into the “tenure” of Wikipedia — we find that e-cademics and e-columnists alike still prefer the remote observation platforms of the Plutonian Astronomer to anything that smacks of nitty-gritty anthro-soc field work.

Those of us who — willye, nillye — got to know Wikiputia, up close and personally attacked, can heartily sympathize with that wish.

But who is going to do the job that real research and real reporting demands?

Jon Awbrey

Latest video from Yer Average Academic Wikipedant Confab (YAAWC)

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It'd be funny if it weren't so true …

Jon

I tried to look at that monstrous JPEG, and it crashed my computer. Swap-file hell.

I had the same experience. NSFCPU.

Yesterday Firefox was reporting "Can't display as file contains errors!" Whilst IE made a gallant attempt but it all went titsup after 10 minutes.

It loaded without incident for me.

You said it!



I agree that it's interesting, but nowhere in the explanatory material does he state the obvious caveat here, which is that in terms of article and category count, Wikipedia is almost overwhelmingly slated towards popular culture topics. Moreover, there's the "Blofeld Slant Effect," whereby large numbers of mass-generated stubs slant results like this toward things that are sourced to mere lists, such as all the small towns in some state or all the members of some country's parliament or military establishment. These articles often have little useful content and get relatively little editing on an ongoing basis; they aren't really reflective of "human knowledge" at all, but I wouldn't imagine that a visualization scheme like this takes any of that into account. How could it, without a prohibitive amount of human intervention?

Whatever serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value this diagram might hold is forfeited by storing it in a raster format. At least with an .svg you could search for titles of interest.

There's some really quite ridiculous things in there.

Fictional rodents? Famous elephants?