History Flow Shows How Wiki Articles Evolve

teslatug writes "IBM has released a preliminary alpha version of its History Flow Visualization Application that shows how collaboratively created documents evolve. The tool is written in Java and it's available for download along with plugins for MoinMoin and MediaWiki. They have some interesting screenshots of the Wikipedia articles on abortion, Brazil, and love."

Here's an Idea

[great throwdini]

Instead of linking simply to the download page and the screenshots, give people a chance to RTFA and link to the History Flow Visualization Application [ibm.com]'s overview document.

Heavy Metal Umlat

[hatrisc]

Heavy Metal Umlat [infoworld.com] is a very interesting look at the history of a Wiki page. Worth checking out.

Re:Here's an Idea

[Amgine0]

Might be nice to link to http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/IBM_releases_freeware_ for_visualizing_document_histories the wikinews article from the 26th...

svn blame

[TrdrJoe]

Tools like "svn blame" or "cvs annotate" are much more useful; they tell you who added each line of text in your file, when they checked it in, etc.).

Still, these tools don't let you see the history of text that has been *deleted*. A visualization like "historyflow" could be useful there

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Sounds of the 80's

[Anonymous Coward]

Google-Eyes, are watchin' YOU.
Their Adsense is watchin' your ev-very move..
Google-Eyes,(KA-CHOW)are watchin' YOU.
Their Adsense is watchin' your ev-very move..

Hey kids, that was Google-Eyes by the Police!

Arrrrrrghghghghghgh!!! "Private Eyes" was NOT by The Police. It was by Hall and Oates (off their Private Eyes album from 1981), for crying out load.

I suggest you check out the music that actually is by The Police, though. It's pretty good stuff, all 5 albums of it. (Why do the great bands have to record only a few albums and then break up?)

Re:Interesting but useful?

[shadowmatter]

From the Overview page on alphaWorks:

The patterns revealed by History Flow Visualization show such information as spacing by date; occurrances of vandalism; authorship; growth; and persistence.

It seems like a good tool for inspecting the history of a document at-a-glance, but you're right -- for more details, there is no substitute for a commit log.

Could be useful, however, in environments such as CVS or Subversion across sets of files... Hmmm.

- shadowmatter

Re:As much

[Spoing]

1. I have no idea what the evolution of those documents was before, and even after viewing the visualizations (and knowing what they mean), I still have no idea what it means about the document.

Go here [ibm.com] and look at the text to the right. It looks like you can 'slice' the graph (the vertical line) and see the color coded text at each point along the graph.

A quick glance through sections would be an easy way to figure out the stability and quality of any one document and who is a good editor or writer.

The Simpsons

[jesterzog]

I'm given to understand that the Simpsons is a popular program, but it is so profoundly anti-intellectual that I can't stand it at all.

I may have misunderstood you or what you mean by anti-intellectual, but personally I've found The Simpsons to be, by far, one of the most insightful shows on TV. Once you look past the humour and the sometimes really bad (occasionally pathetic) joke, especially in more recent episodes, it's a very good satirical commentary on society. It's also not afraid to make fun of itself, and it does so frequently.

If you have an opportunity, I highly recommend Planet Simpson [amazon.com], by Chris Turner. He's a self-confessed Simpsons fan and goes off on tangents a little from time to time, but otherwise I found it to be a very good analysis of The Simpsons and the multitudes of hidden satire of today's society that makes it such a well thought out show.

Clearly the show's not for everyone. If you don't like it then good for you for not watching it. But anti-intellectual is something that The Simpsons definitely isn't, and I think it's short-sighted to call it such. It has stacks more depth and thought put into it than most other relatively shallow content on TV.