Visualization Shows Where in the World Wikipedia Is Edited

Wikipedia is one of the most popular and highly-trafficked websites in the world, with over 3.6 million content pages. While much of the discussion around Wikipedia involves those using the site for research, it's always worth noting - and praising - the tens of thousands of volunteers who actively contribute and edit the content. In fact, according to Wikipedia, there have been some 463 million edits to the site - roughly 19 edits per page.

Wikimedia's data analyst Erik Zachte has just unveiled a new visualization that shows exactly where in the world these edits are occurring on any given day for the various language editions of Wikipedia.

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The visualization is interactive and using various keyboard shortcuts, you can navigate between different views and event markers. You can zoom into a particular area (with the + key), for example, or filter the edits by language (with the space bar).

There are three types of visualizations available with this new tool: an animation of edits, a bubble map, and a heat map - all highlighting the 400,000 some odd edits that occur in a given day.

The tool reveals some interesting trends, not surprisingly showing different language versions more active depending on the time-zones. It also demonstrates that most edits to the Chinese-language Wikipedia come from outside mainland China.

Zachte has written a blog post explaining how he created the visualization tool using HTML5 and JavaScript.

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