WikiChanges

WikiChanges, a web-based application designed to plot an article's revision timeline in real time, and a revisions summarization task that addresses the need to understand what occurred during a given set of revisions are introduced.

Abstract

Wikis are popular tools commonly used to support distributed\ncollaborative work. Wikis can be seen as virtual scrapbooks\nthat anyone can edit without having any specific technical\nknow-how. The Wikipedia is a flagship example of a\nreal-word application of wikis. Due to the large scale of\nWikipedia its difficult to easily grasp much of the information\nthat is stored in this wiki. We address one particular\naspect of this issue by looking at the revision history of each\narticle. Plotting the revision activity in a timeline we expose\nthe complete articles history in a easily understandable\nformat. We present WikiChanges, a web-based application\ndesigned to plot an articles revision timeline in real\ntime. WikiChanges also includes a web browser extension\nthat incorporates activity sparklines in the real Wikipedia.\nFinally, we introduce a revisions summarization task that\naddresses the need to understand what occurred during a\ngiven set of revisions. We present a first approach to this\ntask using tag clouds to present the revisions made.