How do you keep track of the bubbling mass of information that is Wikipedia? It's a mind-boggling task. [New Scientist]
SLIS faculty member, Katy Börner announced the publication of a mosiac that illustrates editing trends in Wikipedia by two members of the SLIS Information Visualization Lab: Bruce Herr and Todd Holloway. Herr is the Senior Software Developer and Visualization Researcher, and Holloway is an I.U. Ph.D. student in Computer Science. Börner is the Director of the Information Visualization Lab.
The mosaic was published in the May 19, 2007 issue of New Scientist at www.newscientist.com in an article called "Power Struggle".
Excerpts from the article:
"How do you keep track of the bubbling mass of information that is Wikipedia? It's a mind-boggling task... To make sense of it all, Bruce Herr and Todd Holloway of Indiana University, Bloomington, created clusters of 300 or so articles that touch on a related topic, such as a religion or a famous person. For each cluster they took one picture from the most popular article and laid them out in a circular grid." Herr notes that "updating the image in real time would allow Wikipedia's administrators to spot where arguments are taking place.If rival contributors are repeatedly changing each other's entries, for example, a page could be locked until the mood cools."
"The mosaic has been commended in a competition for images that visualize network dynamics, coinciding with this week's International Workshop and Conference on Network Science." [New Scientist]
Herr, B. & Holloway, T. (2007). Power Struggle. New Scientist, 2604, 55.
See related SLIS News story:
International Workshop and Conference on Network Science, May 20-25, 2007
Posted May 24, 2007