I got a little bored on my ride on the Bolt Bus so I started surfing around wikipedia. I’ve recently taken to quickly looking at the edits page of a wiki when reading it, just to see if there’s been any interesting or recently activity on the info. Whilst in the midst of checking this info out, I decided it would be cool if there was some quick way to see this info broken down into an easy to read graphical display. This is when I decided that I could probably make this happen with some clever greasemonkeying.
A few hours later I had a proof of concept script that even worked fairly well, thanks to a great little JavaScript/Canvas graphing kit called PlotKit from liquidx.net (which uses excanvas by Google, and MochiKit).
Some screen grabbage:
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The graph is currently edits/time, and it tries to pick an appropriate time scale (months/weeks/days/hours/etc) depending on what the data points are. In the future I’m probably going to add functionality that will let you choose between different datasets, including edits/user.
You can install this script for your use if you use Firefox and have greasemonkey installed. It’s currently setup to only work at en.wikipedia.org, but you can add @includes and it should work with any standard wiki setup.
Update 1: I completely revamped the entire code base, added a new graph option, and made some buttons that let you fiddle around with how much/how the data is displayed.
Update 2: Finally able to get all the external libraries into a packed form and in the proper order so this isn’t such a bear of a file anymore.
Update 3: (version 1.21) Fixed a problem with the aggregation method that caused all times to show at least 1 edit.