Wikipedia’s Growth Animated

For Wikimania 2009 I updated this animation, which I had first published in March 2008. Thanks to Hans Rosling for inspiration. I chose to use newest technology for implementation (html 5, canvas object, javascript only). Hence the animation runs only on Firefox 3+ right now.

Be aware that the animation is processor intensive: close browser window (tab) after use.

wp-2009-09

The animation shows 4 aspects of the development of a project:

  • X-axis:  Age of a project (oldest Wikipedia’s are 8+ years)
  • Y-axis: Number of articles per project
  • Circle size: Number of editors per project
  • Color: Maturity of content (blue=mostly stubs, violet=mostly articles with over 0.5 Kb text)

wp-es-2009-09

Click on any circle during or after the animation to show the full history of one Wikipedia. In this example you see clearly see how the Spanish Wikipedia restarted its community after the so called Spanish Fork.

You can switch between linear and logarithmic scale (last one works best), show all languages at same size, show/hide language codes. You can switch between Wikimedia projects, and change the size of the animation, see links below the chart.

Comments

Pingback from évolution des différentes Wikipédias, animée « Darkoneko’s Weblog
Time Wednesday September 2, 2009 at 9:41 GMT+2

[...] : “Wikipedia’s Growth Animated” sur le blog Infodisiac) Laisser un [...]

Pingback from Wikipédia : évolution version animée « Darkoneko’s Weblog
Time Wednesday September 2, 2009 at 9:42 GMT+2

[...] : “Wikipedia’s Growth Animated” sur le blog Infodisiac) Laisser un [...]

Comment from Ulf Larsen
Time Friday September 18, 2009 at 8:25 GMT+2

This is nice, and I think it can be useful, will try to get others attention to it!

Ulf Larsen, voluntary contributor
Norwegian bokmål/riksmål Wikipedia

Write a comment