In my previous post I wanted to make a pie graph quickly, and so for the first time used Google’s relatively new charting API. It’s a pretty neat little concept, taking in all the data and parameters for the chart in a single URL and then giving you the resulting image. I thought there had to be a better use for that than a static joke pie chart. Then in a meeting of my quiet interest in information visualization and some previous experience at writing a Greasemonkey script (if you know Javascript but haven’t tried GM, do so. It’s actually quite fun and easy), I decided to have a stab at using the API in a slightly more dynamic and useful way.
It’s called WikiStat and shows the time distribution of up to 250 of the most recent edits on an article, giving you a quick insight on how recently and intensively edited a page has been edited.
You’ll need Firefox and Greasemonkey to use it. If you’ve got those, then click here to install it.
I haven’t tested it with anything other than GM 0.7 and FF3b3. I do recall that Opera can do user scripts these days, so it might be able to do it too. No promises though.
I’m most interested in suggestions for improvements.
Update:
Added a pie chart to show approximately how many of the edits were reversions. Makes for somewhat depressing viewing when you then consider there’s an invisible but equally large and ultimately non-productive segment of the pie.
2 responses so far ↓
Ed H. Chi // May 17, 2008 at 1:34 pm |
Very interesting. It’s along the same line as the research that we have been doing called WikiDashboard that displays the social dynamics behind the editing patterns of articles.
Axel // January 28, 2009 at 2:20 am |
Hello , i’m very pleased with your script except it works only with english pages. Do you know anyway to make it works in others languages ?