Wikipedia continues to grow in popularity and scope. My interactions with Wikipedia have been nothing but frustrating, I don't trust the content and simple additions I try to make like coworking (which should have a page) get removed for no known reason by undemocratic self important uberdweebs. The attention that wiki scanner got in the past couple weeks made me aware firstly how naive everyday Internet users are and how wikipedia can serve as an fantastic way to study human nature and how the non-tech world interacts with Social powered media.
Everybody I've worked with in the last 12 months seems to have a new project their working on Alex Rudloff, Gavin Hall and Michael Rhing are working on something yet to be announced, Brian Alvey has Comicmix and a new art project, Jason Calacanis thinks you'll love Mahalo Follow. And now that the shameless link baiting is over let me announce Wikirage which I built over the weekend, a quick little Mashable with some exciting value add - taken from following the latest edits of Wikipedia. Latest news quickly floats to the surface as events are updated and revised. Check it out, give me your feedback.
UPDATE 2007-08-29: I've added an RSS Feed. Let me know if there are different things you'd like to see in the feed.
UPDATE 2007-09-04: If you want to contact me directly, please email me at craig dot wood at NOSPAM gmail dot com.
Comments (47)
Inappropriate or promotional comments may be removed.
Thomas (12:33 AM on Wed Aug 29, 2007)
Great work, Craig. It's interesting to look at popular topics. And it reminds me of just how out of touch I am with pop culture.
Celly (9:51 AM on Wed Aug 29, 2007)
Thats a freaking rad domain.
Craig Wood (12:22 PM on Wed Aug 29, 2007)
Thanks, I often get frustrated when looking for domains and start bitching about squatters, then when I find a good one it makes it that much more satisfying. If you can think of anything else I could do with the domain let me know.
Jim R. Wilson (1:29 PM on Wed Aug 29, 2007)
Hey Craig - that's a really slick tool! I'd like to chat with you regarding the possibility making an API for retrieving this information in a computer-readable format. Please feel free to email me. Thanks in advance.
Mo (9:33 PM on Wed Aug 29, 2007)
Hey that's pretty cool. RSS a pobssibility?
Craig Wood (1:19 AM on Thu Aug 30, 2007)
OK, check out the RSS -- let me know what you thing.
Steve H. (11:14 PM on Wed Aug 29, 2007)
I second the compliments and requests of Jim Wilson and Mo. I'd love to see an RSS feed or some other form of machine-readable version of this info such that I could feed this data into another system I'm developing.
Also, a comment: # edits per unique user (by which I assume you mean a simple division) will highly rank pages where a single user is making a bunch of edits to a page, for example, as one might do when writing a new page. This may or may not be what you intend. I'd also love to see sorts based on alternative metrics like simply "most unique editors" within a given time span (which would elevate pages involved in more "widespread" controversy) and/or "most bytes changed" within a given time span (which would elevate pages where the most *content* is changing). In any event, what you've already done is extremely useful. Thanks!
Craig Wood (1:22 AM on Thu Aug 30, 2007)
It actually is per unique editor over the time period. I am also only looking at major edits as defined by Wikipedia. Great suggestions here, I definitely give more options for users to get the metrics they find valuable, keep the ideas coming.
Anonymous (1:21 PM on Thu Aug 30, 2007)
Good stuff, it would be nice to have a link to the page too.
Craig Wood (11:11 PM on Thu Aug 30, 2007)
All the individual pages link to Wikipedia right below the summary.
Anonymous (2:29 PM on Thu Aug 30, 2007)
The pronunciation key in the logo does not match the actual word. It looks like the pronunciation would be for a word like "wicka-ridge." Really, those pronunciation symbols mean something. Try taking a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet
Craig Wood (3:46 PM on Thu Aug 30, 2007)
Really! I had no idea! The point was to be pretentious. I wouldn't put pronunciation tags in if I wasn't trying get people away from thinking wicky rage -- obviously that is how people will referrer to it.
Pip (8:53 AM on Wed Jan 7, 2009)
I don't understand, why would you purposefully include the incorrect pronunciation?
Craig Wood (9:00 AM on Wed Jan 7, 2009)
Because it is my made up word and I want it pronounced "wicka-ridge."
Haven (4:11 PM on Thu Aug 30, 2007)
Could you give a brief summary of how this works? It seems like you would have to sort/parse a very large amount of data.
Girino (5:03 PM on Thu Aug 30, 2007)
Is wikirage going to be available for wikipedia in other languages? Are you going to make it´s code open source?
Thanks,
Craig Wood (11:21 PM on Thu Aug 30, 2007)
Great ideas, Thanks, I don't believe I will give out the source, but I will add an API for access to the data. I could definitely see adding in foreign language support.
Anonymous (6:23 PM on Thu Aug 30, 2007)
Please link to the wikipedia pages too. Great work!
Anonymous (11:27 PM on Thu Aug 30, 2007)
This is sweet! Kudos.
Is there a straightforward way for one to monitor and filter (or flag) Wikipedia's Main Page Featured Articles? I'm sure the primary reason Houston, TX made the top of the list is because of the attention its Front-Page-Featured status attracted.
... and yes, I should get off my duff and figure out a solution myself... :-)
robl (9:48 AM on Fri Aug 31, 2007)
I love the idea - it works well. Could you us a little more about the dtasource you're using for the data, is it just polling a wikipedia page every x mins or something else ?
David Gerard (4:36 PM on Fri Aug 31, 2007)
Sorry the population of idiots (Wikipedia is on the Internet, so ...) put you off working on it directly. But we like this a lot - as with the WikiScanner, it's good to see someone using our information for more than just putting up a mirror site with Google ads. Are you using the recentchanges feed?
Magus (1:38 PM on Sun Sep 2, 2007)
Awesome idea, and some very unexpected pages coming up in there. (But that animation in the corner isn't really creative-commons licenced, is it? It's been around for years and that's just some wiki hotlinking it.)
Loran (5:37 AM on Mon Sep 3, 2007)
Really nice tool!
Would it be possible to have it for fr.wikipedia.org?
Craig Wood (1:56 PM on Tue Sep 4, 2007)
The french site is live http://fr.wikirage.com
Loran (3:46 PM on Tue Sep 4, 2007)
Excellent!!
Thanks
Anonymous (10:21 AM on Mon Sep 3, 2007)
I would appreciate spanish version.
good work. best regards.
Fer
Anonymous (11:48 AM on Tue Sep 4, 2007)
Great work, just a note, on french version, the link to full article links to english wikipedia.
Craig Wood (1:57 PM on Tue Sep 4, 2007)
Thanks for letting me know it has been fixed.
Anonymous (3:06 PM on Tue Sep 4, 2007)
Great idea and execution--bravo!
How about a RSS feed?
Anonymous (9:48 PM on Tue Sep 4, 2007)
Dear Craig Wood,
I'm writing this message on behalf of Yomiuri telecasting Corporation, one of Japanese local broadcasting companies.
I'd like to get permission from you in order to use your website. There's a TV program called "Asa para" (a variaty live show in the morning like "Today" and "Good Morning America."
In the program, top ten keywords searched within Japanese search engines "Yahoo! Japan" for the week are introduced, and "Wikirage," were ranked in second in this week.
Therefore, we'd like to show the Japanese website on pc for about 10 seconds in the TV program.
Since we have to prepare the materials by this Friday, I appreciate your quick responce for this matter.
Sincerely,
Craig Wood (10:03 PM on Tue Sep 4, 2007)
Unfortunately you didn't leave me your email address, but yes you have permission to show a screenshot of the wikirage website and mention the name. I would appreciate if you would contact me at craig dot wood at gmail dot com, and arrange to send me a recording of the program.
Ziggy (3:12 PM on Sat Sep 8, 2007)
Is there any way you could presnet a summary of all the data? Average edits, vandalism per edit, etc.? I'd like to use your site as a source for a paper I'm writing, and, frankly, I'm too lazy to total it up manually. I don't know how difficult this would be, so, if I'm putting you out, sorry. Besides, I think that that would just be cool anyway.
Anonymous (5:39 PM on Sun Sep 9, 2007)
It's be nice if you could show which items were recently on the front page of Wikipedia.
Craig Wood (11:02 PM on Sun Sep 9, 2007)
Yep, Wanna do that, also hoping to identify items that have been removed.
arnauld (11:22 AM on Tue Sep 11, 2007)
so so interesting what u did...thks wikirage
Ed Chi (6:06 PM on Tue Sep 11, 2007)
You guys might also be interested in http://wikidashboard.parc.com, which are dashboards that are added to every page, visualizing the editing patterns, top editors, and other statistics for each page, including user pages. We had just announced it.
Rik (1:01 PM on Tue Sep 25, 2007)
This is a incredible tool. Great work! Is there a way to configure wikirage to work with other wikis? Of course free is best. ;) But I'm doing research on wikis and would pay for this (not much . . . I'm just a poor grad student). I would imagine other researchers (and more nefarious types) will see the value of wikirage.
http://www.justshmooze.com (10:23 AM on Fri Jan 25, 2008)
website is down...
Moon Lucas (12:45 PM on Tue Feb 5, 2008)
VERY IMPRESSIVE, Mr. Wood!
Congrats to you!!
XO- M
MightFunk (5:17 PM on Sun May 11, 2008)
I'll tell you a good reason why we should all hate Wikipedia. Here's my experience with this piece of garbage website:
http://www.mightyfunk.com/2008/05/wikipedia-equals-fail-d...
John Smith (5:08 PM on Tue May 27, 2008)
Hi,
I really like your blog because I love wikipedia. I was wondering if you could blog about this widget I have here. It's a Wikipedia Search Bar for your blog.
thanks so much!
-John Smith
Wikimedia Sverige (9:19 AM on Sat Jun 7, 2008)
Really nice tool!
Would it be possible to have it for sv.wikipedia.org?
Bob Geller (1:24 PM on Thu Nov 20, 2008)
Is there a way to see new entries in Wikipedia? Or get a buzz index on terms people are searching on in Wikipedia?
AJ Cann (1:09 PM on Wed Jun 3, 2009)
Nice site but RSS feeds currently say "(title unknown)" - less than useful.
Reverson Entertainment (6:24 PM on Mon Oct 12, 2009)
Please delete the wikirage page for "Reverson Entertainment", as that information violates company rights. The editor that used this name on "wikipedia" had no right to use this copyrighted name.
Tony (5:29 PM on Thu Dec 17, 2009)
Awesome app, thanks. Would be even cooler if you could somehow also report on the pages that are getting the most traffic each hour/day/week.
Kudos!
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