On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 5:46 AM, Erik Zachte <[email protected]>wrote:
> In Wikimania Boston, 2006, visualization experts [1] Fernanda Viégas en > Martin Wattenberg presented a tool which could produce a tag cloud from a > person's edit history. Tag clouds were a novelty and very suitable for the > matter at hand. You could see at a glance that editor Johanna Doe was > mainly > engaged in articles about say classic music, and Chinese and Iran politics, > which is OK of course, but maybe better left to the person to disclose at > her own discretion. We discussed implications of the visualization: on one > hand this was all data from the public dumps, and anyone could make such a > script once the idea spread, on the other hand would it be wise to help > facilitate this process. I later found out they decided not to publish the > tool for this very reason. > > [1] See first two entries on > http://infodisiac.com/Wikimedia/Visualizations/ > > Erik Zachte > That is really sad. As a Wikipedian, I would hate to see any researcher shy away from publishing interesting and insightful visualizations of public data. If you're producing analyses that call out individual editors, then yes, it would be wise to make such tools opt-in. But for every Wikipedian who would rather not, there are ten more (like me) that really want more insight into the rich data set of our editing histories. Steven
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