29 October 2010

Revisions=f(time): and the winner is Charles Darwin

I've been playing with the mediawiki API to draw a timeline of popular scientists through the last centuries using the number of revisions in wikipedia as the Y-axis. The java code generating this timeline is available here:WikipediaBioEdits.java. This code:
  • loops over the articles having a Template:infobox scientist
  • gets the categories of an article and retrieves the birth/death dates threw the categories 'Births_by_year' and 'Deaths_by_year'
  • gets one picture in an article an resizes it to 64px
  • counts the number of revisions for an article


At the end, the generated timeline looks like this: (best viewed with firefox):
1192196227323502427250425812658273528122152515791633168717411795184919031957

That's it

Pierre
at

1 comment:

  1. AnonymousFriday, 29 October, 2010

    Minor correction:
    "Popular scientists through the last centuries"

    ReplyDelete