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Wassup, Wikipedia? Oh … wow!

Hilda Bastian Science Communication

It’s one of the world’s most used websites – there are more than 20 billion page views a month. That’s hard to fathom, isn’t it? But right now, don’t try to: just dip into this for a few moments. It’s an audio-visualization of only around 15% of the edits happening right now in the English Wikipedia – that’s just the anonymous ones. (In “about”, you can pick one of 10 other Wikipedia language versions.) The pitch of the sound and size of the bubble indicates size of the edit. (Sound might not work on all mobile devices.)

Screenshot of Listen to Wikipedia webpage
Click here for the audio-visualization of Wikipedia editing happening now

Or watch the geographic version. And here’s a ticker of absolutely all the edits live. If you prefer your data straight up, here’s the Wikipedia statistics page.

Photo of Wiki Women's lunch in 2012
The Wiki Women’s lunch at Wikimania 2012 in Washington DC

Wikipedians from around the world are converging now on Hong Kong for the annual get-together (Wikimania). Read about last year’s here in my post, Are you a knowledge philanthropist? If not, why not?

And there’s more at this post about Wikipedia’s recent visit to the National Institutes of Health (NIH): the world’s biggest encyclopedia met the world’s biggest medical library! There are links there too to resources to get you started at Wikipedia. There’s always someone willing to help if you need. As you’ve just seen, there are plenty online right now!

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The thoughts Hilda Bastian expresses here are personal, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Institutes of Health or the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

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