viz. - Wikipedia

SOPA and PIPA; Or, If It Weren't For The Internet, We Would Have No Idea What Was Going On

Marjorie Foley — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 20:31:47 +0000

Image Credit: Wikipedia

If you didn't see this image last week, you may have been hiding under a rock. Wikipedia reports that 162 million people viewed this image on January 18 as a result of their protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, which involved blocking all English-language content on the website. As a result of the blackout, 8 million people looked up their representatives in Congress, and a unknown number of people tweeted amusing and seeemingly illiterate things. (Mildly NSFW content in full post.)

Image Credit: Twitter

One collection of these amusing tweets can be found at herpderpedia, where one can read tweeted criticisms of the Wikipedia blackout, many of which profess to know absolutely nothing about the reasons behind the protest, even though users have just visited the site, which explained the reasoning behind blocking content. If one thing is clear from all these tweets, it's that students don't know how to function without Wikipedia. And, I confess, it was a tough day for me, too. There are just so many things to look up!

Criticisms of online protests by Wikipedia and other major websites like Google and Reddit were not just limited to the herpderps of high school and college students trying to complete their homework. A particularly nasty editorial from the Boston Herald describes the protests as a "hissy fit" that would only effect college students who should really be doing their research elsewhere. The Herald is among a reduced number of papers that still supports SOPA, that reduction being a direct result of internet protests.

Image Credit: caffpowered via reddit.com

And, as is usually the case when the internet gets something done, those involved were pretty proud of themselves. One Reddit user celebrated the sea change with this Photoshopped image of a still from 300 (making the image an adaptation of an adaptation of an adaptation), which likens himself and other users to a few Spartans defending their homeland against invasion by a vast number of evil forces. While from the outside, the image may seem pretentious (you might notice that the shields, made from web browser logos, exclude Internet Explorer, which only a rube would use), the celebration and self-congratulation are not unfounded.

Image Credit: Google

This infographic from Google shows how the internet response triggered mass protest in the forms of 887,000 telephone calls to Congress and telephone and 3,000,000 signatures on anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA petitions, and this image is a few days old already. Opposition to the bill is credited to the availability of information on the internet, and many news sources and protest websites credit their actions with educating the American public about SOPA and PIPA, even if herpderpedia shows that many Americans still did not understand the protests.

Image Credit: ProPublica.org

The most telling image comes from ProPublica, a non-profit internet news publication that won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2011, the first time that a non-print publication won. The infographic details who supported and opposed SOPA and PIPA prior to and following the January 18th protest, showing just how effective the January 18 actions were.

Wikipediavision: Visualizing anonymous edits to Wikipedia

John Jones — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:31:46 +0000

László Kozma, a grad-student at the Helsinki University of Technology, has created Wikipediavision a mashup of Wikipedia edits and Google maps reminiscent of Twittervision and Flickrvision.

Here’s part of the description from the site’s FAQ:

WikiPediaVision is a visualization of edits to the English Wikipedia, almost the same time as they happen. . . . For each wikipedia edit I display the title of the article, the summary of the edit (if the person who made it gave any summary), link to the changes that were made to the article, geographical location of the wikipedia user and the time the edit happened.

Apparently, Kozma’s site skips a lot of edits:

First of all, edits on wikipedia happen at a faster rate, than what could be comfortably readable, so I have to skip some of them. Second, a good part of the edits are done by registered users. Their IP address is protected by wikipedia, therefore I could only display anonymous edits. Thirdly, those edits, where the IP address could not be located are skipped. Fourth, edits that are similar or identical to recent edits are often skipped. This still leaves more than enough to be visualized.

However, the project is still interesting. Hopefully he will expand it in the future.

via Brady Forrest at O’Reilly Radar

Visual Search for Wikipedia

John Jones — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 21:32:09 +0000

The good folks over at Information Aesthetics recently posted a link to Wiki Mind Map. The site provides a mind-map-style outline of topics in Wikipedia.

Right now the site appears to be able to search the German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan, and Indonesian versions of the encyclopedia. It can also search www.self-qs.de, which appears to be some sort of German dictionary (perhaps a German-speaker can help out here).

A few thoughts about this tool jumped out at me immediately: first, it seems like an excellent way for students (and everyone else who uses Wikipedia) to find related topics for a search term. Additionally, it allows visual thinkers to search the Wikipedia knowledge-base without having to read a bunch of annoying text.

However, I'm not sure that the mind map metaphor is the best one for this task. The searches I have done never go beyond the second-level in the hierarchy, making me wonder what purpose the hierarchy serves. Even if the engine was able to add deeper levels of results, I wonder if a simple clustering structure would be better for the presentation. It is unlikely that the deeper levels would be very well ordered, and the clustering method wouldn’t imply the kind of regimented outline that is the basis of the mindmap. If someone could put this same functionality into an interface like Visual Thesaurus and have it search through a couple layers of pages, the tool would be much more handy.