University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

Quick post (really should be doing something else). Reading Jeff
Atwood\'s post [Mixing Oil and Water: Authorship in a Wiki
World](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001222.html) lead me to
IBM\'s wonderful [history
flow](http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/visual/projects/history_flow/explanation.htm)
tool to visualise the edit history of a Wikipedia page.  
  

> Imagine a scenario where three people will make contributions to a
> Wiki page at different points in time. Each person edits the page and
> then saves their changes to what becomes the latest version of that
> page.  
>   
>
> ::: {style="text-align:center;"}
> ![history-flow-animation.gif](http://lh6.ggpht.com/_Gct8lVAxKqQ/SqEbYDhc-mI/AAAAAAAAAiI/SrPGds0g7iI/history-flow-animation.gif?imgmax=800){border="0"
> width="400"}
> :::
>
>   
> History Flow connects text that has been kept the same between
> consecutive versions. Pieces of text that do not have correspondence
> in the next (or previous) version are not connected and the user sees
> a resulting \"gap\" in the visualization; this happens for deletions
> and insertions. (animated GIF from [Jeff Atwood\'s
> post](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001222.html)).

  
  
There\'s a nice paper describing history flow
([doi:10.1145/985692.985765](http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/985692.985765),
free PDF
[here](http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/papers/history_flow.pdf)).
Inspired by this I decided to try and implement history flow in PHP and
SVG. Here\'s a preliminary result:  
  

::: {style="text-align:center;"}
[![afrotheria.png](http://lh6.ggpht.com/_Gct8lVAxKqQ/SqEYi8p95cI/AAAAAAAAAiE/2en60CNmaAk/afrotheria.png?imgmax=800){border="0"
width="400"}](http://bioguid.info/demos/mammals/afrotheria.svg){target="_new"}
:::

  
This is the edit history for the
[Afrotheria](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrotheria) page. Click on the
image above (or
[here](http://bioguid.info/demos/mammals/afrotheria.svg){target="_new"}
to see the SVG image \-- you need a decent web browser for this, IE uses
will need a SVG plugin).  
  
The SVG image is clickable. The columns represent revisions, click on
those to go to that revision. The columns are evenly spaced (i.e., the
gaps don\'t correspond to time). The bands between revisions trace
individual blocks of text (in this case lines in the Wikipedia page
source). If you click on a band you get taken to that Wikipedia user\'s
page.  
  
This is all done in a rush, but it gives an idea of what can be done.
The history flow carries all sorts of information about how an article
has developed over time, major changes (such as the introduction of
Taxoboxes), and makes the content of a page traceable, in the sense that
you can see who contributed what to a page.


Quick post (really should be doing something else). Reading Jeff Atwood's post Mixing Oil and Water: Authorship in a Wiki World lead me to IBM's wonderful history flow tool to visualise the edit history of a Wikipedia page. There's a nice paper describing history flow (doi:10.1145/985692.985765, free PDF here). Inspired by this I decided to try and implement history flow in PHP and SVG.

Rogue Scholar Beiträge

Visualising edit history of a Wikipedia page