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."

Interesting but useful?

[thundercatslair]

This program is interesting to look at for a little while, but can it do anything useful? I don't really see a need to see the history of a wiki visually.

As much

[odano]

As much as I love visualizing things that aren't visual, it just doesn't seem like this application changed the data into anything useful.

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.

Re:As much

[FarHat]

Without the actual document, a graph such as this doesn't tell you anything. What it could tell you, along with the document that it is representing would be much of a document changes in any given time. Are there parts of the document that are essentially static. Parts that are static would be parts that there is little disagreement about. Parts that change a lot could be considered controversial. Heavy editing would indicate a lot of popular interest in the article, etc.

Re:MOD IBM -1 REDUNDANT ;-)

[Stalyn]

poor Amsterdam Vallon... his posts are somewhat informative and interesting but are constantly being modded down because he asks people to think of Terri Schiavo when right now a lot of people can't stand her (well the media coverage).

btw Amsterdam if thats your real name are you of any relation to Archimedes Plutonium [wikipedia.org]?

Re:MOD IBM -1 REDUNDANT ;-)

[Guppy06]

"I'm a Wikipedia editor by night..."

"Please keep Terry and those who love her in your prayers"

So much for non-POV.

evil linkage

[SuperBanana]

a very interesting look at the history of a Wiki page. Worth checking out.

A guy loads the Heavy Metal Umlat page v1.0 and steps through the hundreds of versions while talking in a nerdy voice and laughing about attempts at using unicode and LaTeX for rendering the band name Spinal Tap. He provides a near monotone commentary to what is very obviously changing in the page. "Oh, look at that, someone added something. Fascinating."

That was neither interesting, nor worth checking out, and I hold you personally responsible for the 5 minutes of my life I wasted on it.

Re:svn blame

[Anonymous Coward]

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.).

In other news, scientific papers have this thing called an "abstract" so you can get a general idea of what's the paper is about without reading the whole thing.

I think you're getting confused on the difference between "more useful" and "more detailed".

It's based on diff format...

[vhogemann]

So it might be used to show progress over time on open-source projects. It would be usefull to show progress over a single project or how two projects merged, and to show wich contribuitions made it to final versions, or witch developer has more code on it.

It should be very interesting to see it applied to big projects, like the Linux kernel or the KDE project to see how it evolved from the number of contribuitions and devellopers, and to see how long each contribuition survived unnaltered on the source.

It could prove to be a very usefull tool indeed.

Ironic that this gets posted on Slashdot...

[corporatemutantninja]

...yet Slashdot passed on an opportunity to have something like this for themselves.

The IBM researcher who created this software, Martin Wattenberg [ibm.com], also wrote some really cool tools for visualizing and navigating Slashdot threads. He said he would be happy to let Slashdot use them for free so I made an intro but the /. guys never followed up.

Re:svn blame

[gl4ss]

you don't want to see who added each line if there's 5000 people involvelved in a flame war, you just want to see which part of the document is suspect to be part of that flaming.

Re:evil linkage

[Scrameustache]

A guy loads the Heavy Metal Umlat page v1.0 and steps through the hundreds of versions while talking in a nerdy voice [...] He provides a near monotone commentary

That's redundant. I wish I could edit that paragraph...

That was neither interesting, nor worth checking out, and I hold you personally responsible for the 5 minutes of my life I wasted on it.

I found that clip very interresting, but I now wasted about a minute of my time replying to a "waah-waah I didn't find this as interrestnig as you so you shouldn't have shared it" comment.
Give me back my minute.