Live map of recent changes to Wikipedia articles

http://rcmap.hatnote.com/#en

by bufo • 13 years ago

65 13 13 years ago

rcmap.hatnote.com

dzent• 13 years ago

this is really cool. although seeing a bunch of 503s from their geoip service. maybe hitting usage limits?

innernette• 13 years ago

haha, yeah, we noticed freegeoip.net is effectively getting DDoS'd a few hours ago: https://twitter.com/mhashemi/status/333407761993957376

But it seemed to be holding at the time. Hopefully a local copy of the geodata will work better.

mhashemi2• 13 years ago

Backstory here: freegeoip.net has an hourly per-IP limit, so we distributed the load by doing the geolocation from client browsers. This borked freegeoip after many hours of Twitter/Ars Technica'ing.

It was a good thing Github got its storage servers back up; we're now running a local clone of freegeoip, as freegeoip.net smolders.

To freegeoip.net! May it rise again soon.

mhashemi2• 13 years ago

(N.B. for returning visitors: The sooner you force-refresh, the sooner freegeoip.net rises again.)

lake99• 13 years ago

Yikes! This has been a revelation. I had never realized that such a large portion of the edits are malevolent. Within the first couple of minutes of using it, I saw someone replace a useful citation URL by a link to Facebook, a few instances of people inserting random words, etc.

I wonder if Wikipedia has an automated way of dealing with this.

ekr• 13 years ago

It has some kind of anti-spam bots (and other uses). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots

simonw• 13 years ago

It does - Wikipedia has a small army of bots which monitor and in some cases automatically revert changes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots

Here are changes made by one of the most active anti-vandalism bots:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/ClueBot_N...

tekacs• 13 years ago

To be fair, given that this only shows unregistered edits, the proportion of malevolent edits seems... unsurprising?

MasterScrat• 13 years ago

It'd be nice to see the Edit summary of each edit.

witek• 13 years ago

This is so cool, love it.

chestnut-tree• 13 years ago

This is very cool. It reminds me a bit of the "Watch people shop" feature from online bookstore bookdepository.co.uk

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/live

The sort of thing you can just sit and watch for ages.

acadien• 13 years ago

Something almost identical to this was posted 2 or 3 days ago. I can't seem find to it now, but if I do I'll be sure to link it since maybe you and the other author would be interested in chatting.

datahipster• 13 years ago

Ha. I actually submitted a same demo 24 hours prior to your posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5688411. At first I was mildly irritated, thinking that someone rehashed what I cooked up, but after looking at your repo, I see that you guys have been playing around with this for a few weeks, so - hooray for simultaneous discovery! :) Anyway, I really do like the rendering you guys have going on. One other thing you can do is hit the Wikipedia API to extract out the "coordinates" property for the page that was updated and show that. Make sure to change any page titles from "Talk/<Page>" to "<Page>" to pull out more relevant changes.

Live map of recent changes to Wikipedia articles

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