Quick post (really should be doing something else). Reading Jeff Atwood's post Mixing Oil and Water: Authorship in a Wiki World lead me to IBM's wonderful history flow tool to visualise the edit history of a Wikipedia page. There's a nice paper describing history flow (doi:10.1145/985692.985765, free PDF here). Inspired by this I decided to try and implement history flow in PHP and SVG.
Given that one response to my post on Fungi in Wikipedia was to say that fungi are also charismatic, so maybe I should try [insert unsexy taxon name here]. So, I've now looked at all the species I extracted from Wikipedia (nearly 72,000), ran the Google searches, and here are the results:SiteHow many times is it the top
One response to the analysis I did of the Google rank of mammal pages in Wikipedia is to suggest that Wikipedia does well for mammals because these are charismatic. It's been suggested that for other groups of taxa Wikipedia might not be so prominent in the search results.As a quick test I extracted the 1552 fungal species I could find in Wikipedia and repeated the analysis.
Playing a bit more with the Wikipedia mammal data, there are some interesting patterns to note.
One assumption I've been making so far is that when people search for information on an organism using its scientific name, Wikipedia will dominate the search results (see my earlier post for an example of this assumption). I've decided to quantify this by doing a little experiment. I grabbed the Mammal Species of the World taxonomy and extracted the 5416 species names. I then used Google's AJAX search API to look up each name in Google.
Continuing the saga of making sense of the mammal classification in Wikipedia, I've done a quick comparison with the Mammal Species of the World (third edition) classification. MSW is the default taxonomic reference used by WikiProject Mammals.
Following on from my previous post about visualising the mammalian classification in Wikipedia, I've extracted the largest component from the graph for all mammal taxa in Wikipedia, and it is a tree. This wasn't apparent in the previous diagram, where the component appeared as a big ball due to the layout algorithm used.
As part of my on-going experiments with Wikipedia as a repository of taxonomic information, I've extracted mammal pages from Wikipedia.
While thinking about measuring the quality of Wikipedia articles by counting the number of times they cite external literature, and conversely measuring the impact of papers by how many times they're cited in Wikipedia, I discovered, as usual, that somebody has already done it. I came across this nice paper by Finn Årup Nielsen (arXiv:0705.2106v1) (originally published in First Monday as a HTML document, I've embedded the PDF from arXiv
What follows are some random thoughts as I try and sort out what things I want to focus on in the coming days/weeks. If you don't want to see some wallowing and general procrastination, look away now.I see four main strands in what I've been up to in the last year or so:servicesmashupswikisphyloinformaticsLet's take these in turns. Services Not glamourous, but necessary.