Visualizing Science & Tech Activity in Wikipedia

If you didn’t see our original Wikipedia Activity Visualization, check it out here (there’s a detailed explanation, as well).  Also, there is a Google maps style zoomable version here.

This new version uses the same layout and images (well, slightly improved) as the original, but this time we tried to highlight activity in regions of Wikipedia that are predominately math or science or technology. 

So we developed a program to classify Wikipedia articles as being one of these three categories (or none), based on the categories the article was assigned to and their positions in the Wikipedia category link network. 

We were not surprised to see a tight cluster of math pages, in a region, I would add, which has little ‘hot’ activity.  In fact, the only article in that region with lots of activity is the article “Earth”.  It was also not surprising that technology articles are fairly spread out among the topics.

What’s striking is the science-related band (green-blue) that runs diagonal through the middle of the topic map.  I won’t share my interpretation, but rather let those interested come up with there own.  Hope you enjoy, please leave comments!

(CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE)

Above: The most actively edited science-related articles.

Left: Not much science here…a good indication the algorithms are working pretty well!

(Via A Beautiful WWW.)