5 ms·

Live map of recent changes to Wikipedia articles

65 points by bufo 13y ago

dzent 13y ago
this is really cool. although seeing a bunch of 503s from their geoip service. maybe hitting usage limits?
- innernette 13y ago
  haha, yeah, we noticed freegeoip.net is effectively getting DDoS'd a few hours ago: https://twitter.com/mhashemi/status/333407761993957376 https://twitter.com/mhashemi/status/333407761993957376 But it seemed to be holding at the time. Hopefully a local copy of the geodata will work better.
- mhashemi 13y ago
  Backstory here: freegeoip.net has an hourly per-IP limit, so we distributed the load by doing the geolocation from client browsers. This borked freegeoip after many hours of Twitter/Ars Technica'ing. It was a good thing Github got its storage servers back up; we're now running a local clone of freegeoip, as freegeoip.net smolders. To freegeoip.net! May it rise again soon.
  - mhashemi 13y ago
    (N.B. for returning visitors: The sooner you force-refresh, the sooner freegeoip.net rises again.)
lake99 13y ago
Yikes! This has been a revelation. I had never realized that such a large portion of the edits are malevolent. Within the first couple of minutes of using it, I saw someone replace a useful citation URL by a link to Facebook, a few instances of people inserting random words, etc. I wonder if Wikipedia has an automated way of dealing with this.
- ekr 13y ago
  It has some kind of anti-spam bots (and other uses). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots
- simonw 13y ago
  It does - Wikipedia has a small army of bots which monitor and in some cases automatically revert changes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots Here are changes made by one of the most active anti-vandalism bots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/ClueBot_NG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/ClueBot_N...
- tekacs 13y ago
  To be fair, given that this only shows unregistered edits, the proportion of malevolent edits seems... unsurprising?
MasterScrat 13y ago
It'd be nice to see the Edit summary of each edit.
witek 13y ago
This is so cool, love it.
chestnut-tree 13y ago
This is very cool. It reminds me a bit of the "Watch people shop" feature from online bookstore bookdepository.co.uk http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/live http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/live The sort of thing you can just sit and watch for ages.
acadien 13y ago
Something almost identical to this was posted 2 or 3 days ago. I can't seem find to it now, but if I do I'll be sure to link it since maybe you and the other author would be interested in chatting.
datahipster 13y ago
Ha. I actually submitted a same demo 24 hours prior to your posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5688411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5688411. At first I was mildly irritated, thinking that someone rehashed what I cooked up, but after looking at your repo, I see that you guys have been playing around with this for a few weeks, so - hooray for simultaneous discovery! :) Anyway, I really do like the rendering you guys have going on. One other thing you can do is hit the Wikipedia API to extract out the "coordinates" property for the page that was updated and show that. Make sure to change any page titles from "Talk/<Page>" to "<Page>" to pull out more relevant changes.

65 points by bufo 13y ago

dzent 13y ago

this is really cool. although seeing a bunch of 503s from their geoip service. maybe hitting usage limits?

innernette 13y ago
haha, yeah, we noticed freegeoip.net is effectively getting DDoS'd a few hours ago: https://twitter.com/mhashemi/status/333407761993957376 https://twitter.com/mhashemi/status/333407761993957376 But it seemed to be holding at the time. Hopefully a local copy of the geodata will work better.
mhashemi 13y ago
Backstory here: freegeoip.net has an hourly per-IP limit, so we distributed the load by doing the geolocation from client browsers. This borked freegeoip after many hours of Twitter/Ars Technica'ing. It was a good thing Github got its storage servers back up; we're now running a local clone of freegeoip, as freegeoip.net smolders. To freegeoip.net! May it rise again soon.
- mhashemi 13y ago
  (N.B. for returning visitors: The sooner you force-refresh, the sooner freegeoip.net rises again.)

lake99 13y ago

Yikes! This has been a revelation. I had never realized that such a large portion of the edits are malevolent. Within the first couple of minutes of using it, I saw someone replace a useful citation URL by a link to Facebook, a few instances of people inserting random words, etc. I wonder if Wikipedia has an automated way of dealing with this.

ekr 13y ago
It has some kind of anti-spam bots (and other uses). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots
simonw 13y ago
It does - Wikipedia has a small army of bots which monitor and in some cases automatically revert changes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots Here are changes made by one of the most active anti-vandalism bots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/ClueBot_NG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/ClueBot_N...
tekacs 13y ago
To be fair, given that this only shows unregistered edits, the proportion of malevolent edits seems... unsurprising?

MasterScrat 13y ago

It'd be nice to see the Edit summary of each edit.

witek 13y ago

This is so cool, love it.

chestnut-tree 13y ago

This is very cool. It reminds me a bit of the "Watch people shop" feature from online bookstore bookdepository.co.uk http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/live http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/live The sort of thing you can just sit and watch for ages.

acadien 13y ago

Something almost identical to this was posted 2 or 3 days ago. I can't seem find to it now, but if I do I'll be sure to link it since maybe you and the other author would be interested in chatting.

datahipster 13y ago

Ha. I actually submitted a same demo 24 hours prior to your posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5688411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5688411. At first I was mildly irritated, thinking that someone rehashed what I cooked up, but after looking at your repo, I see that you guys have been playing around with this for a few weeks, so - hooray for simultaneous discovery! :) Anyway, I really do like the rendering you guys have going on. One other thing you can do is hit the Wikipedia API to extract out the "coordinates" property for the page that was updated and show that. Make sure to change any page titles from "Talk/<Page>" to "<Page>" to pull out more relevant changes.