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Vis-à-Wik: a visual analytics tool for Wikipedia analysis

Further to a short paper I wrote with ArzuKathryn, Scott, and Ralph (see Collaborative Visualizations for Wikipedia Critique and Activism), I started working on Vis-à-Wik, a simple online visual analytics tool for Wikipedia analysis. Vis-à-Wik retrieves data from the MediaWiki Wikipedia API, and uses D3js to visualize the links between Wikipedia articles as a network diagram. This simple tool allows users to search for Wikipedia articles in a selected language edition, and visualize the articles selected by the user as a set of nodes, along with the related articles in a second language edition, and the links and language-links between them. The aim is facilitate mid-scale analysis of Wikipedia content — that is somewhere between a single-page analysis (that editors do routinely) and large-scale analyses (e.g., academic research projects).

Vis-à-Wik is available for testing at sdesabbata.github.io/vis-a-wik, while the code is available on GitHub (github.com/sdesabbata/vis-a-wik) under the GPLv3 licence. This is not a collaborative visualization tool, and currently implements only one of the visualization methods, but it is a first step (hopefully) of a larger endeavour.

The image below is a screenshot showing the same graph in the illustrative example presented in Collaborative Visualizations for Wikipedia Critique and Activism.

vis-a-wik-alpha_0-0-2

Vis-à-Wik screenshot.

 

One Comment

  1. Hi stefano, would you be interested also in the Mindmap of Wikipedia itself?
    Mindmap of wikipedia has been computed directly from the dump.
    Please see mockups here:
    http://www.xdiscovery.com

    On the mobile app Learn Discovery, for iOS, there’s full access to mindmap and can save semantic trees for any topic.
    Here a link:
    http://www.learndiscovery.com

    I’d like tohave your comment – please tell me if you would like a promo code an check out the app, since now it is priced.

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