The whole concept of Wikipedia still gives me chills sometimes, especially when I see new representations of the collaborative power behind it. I just think it’s such an inspirational accomplishment, and, even though I know this sounds really, really weird, in some ways I think Wikipedia represents a glimmer of hope for a world that in many other ways I see heading for some dark days. That in itself sounds pretty depressing…
Anyway, via Steve Cohen comes this very cool real-time update log of Wikipedia. You can see the line for each edit in Wikipedia as it’s made. In the few moments it’s taken to create this post, over 80 edits have been made about everything from the Pakistani Coast Guard to Keropok (the most visible fried snack in Terengganu) to Mog (a playable character from the Squaresoft game Final Fantasy VI…Huh?) How cool is that? And how cool is it that just in these last 15 minutes, dozens if not hundreds of people have felt compelled to add what they know to this “compendium of all human knowledge.”
And I also think it’s cool that Steve Jobs called Wikipedia one of the most accurate encyclopedias in the world. That probably won’t convince my librarians, but it can’t hurt…
And a few hours of blog-ularity killed it:
http://kohl.wikimedia.org/cgi-bin/rcdumper
“Sorry, rcdumper is a prototype tool not intended for widespread public use. being linked from a high traffic website has created too much load, and it is temporarily offline.”
Glad you got a peek though, what a wild concept!
But check out WikiPulse (http://www.qwikly.com/WikiPulse.html)
“In the last 59 minutes there have been 54 new articles, 199 new pages, 2799 new edits. On the English Wikipedia there are currently 588477 total articles, 624 featured articles, and 1738262 total pages, with 16813116 total edits and 9.67 average edits per page. There are 291812 registered users and 484, or 0.17% are administrators. 180 people are currently chatting in #Wikipedia, and over the last 286 days there have been 7331 nicks.”