Monday, January 19, 2015

The Wikipedia Fight Map


Wikipedia Article Contributor Locations lets you view where anonymous edits to Wikipedia articles were made from. The map is capable of visualizing more than one article's edits on the same map so can be used to make some interesting comparisons.

Here are some links to view the maps of Wikipedia edits to religious figures - Muhammad vs Jesus vs Vishnu, major cities - San Francisco vs New York City vs Chicago and world leaders - Barack Obama vs Elizabeth II vs Pranab Mukherjee.

The map uses the MediaWiki API to get the IP address of each revision to an article. The locations are displayed using the Leaflet mapping platform. The code for the visualization is open source and available on GitHub.


Frankenplace is a 'thematic map search engine.' Which means that you can use the map to create instant heat-maps for a range of words based on the words' frequency in over 1.6 million articles on Wikipedia and online travel blog entries.

Frankenplace can therefore be used to get an understanding of the spatial dynamics of a topic by providing a heat map of the topic as featured in Wikipedia and travel blogs. The site can also be used as a search engine to find relevant documents that march your search query.

For example, in my search for 'mosques' I might only be interested in French mosques. I can therefore use the map to zoom in on France. If I then mouse-over Paris on the map the side-panel shows me a link to the Grand Mosque of Évry. I can even read the Wikipedia for the Grand Mosque of Évry directly from the map.


Wikipedia Worldview is an interesting visualization of geo-referenced Wikipedia entries. Using the application you can select a language and view a dot-map of the world created purely through the plots of all the locations of Wikipedia entries.

You can select to view a single language's Wikipedia entries or any combination of languages. A geo-referenced map of the world is then created from all the geo-tagged articles in the chosen language(s). When the map has been created you can even click on the map to link through to the selected Wikipedia article.


WikipediaVision is an animated Google Map of real-time map edits to Wikipedia.

The map displays an information window for each edit, with the title of the article, the summary of the edit (if a summary was given), a link to the changes that were made to the article and the time the edit happened.

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