Description
The second visualization has its focus on only one page - ‘opioid epidemic’ – that shows all the changes that occurred in its contents during this year. What we consider extremely interesting – and also the reason why we picked this page in the first place – is that it was created in early 2017 and despite being relatively new, has already underwent a great amount of changes in its subtopics. The graph shows the quantity, in terms of bytes, of edits that users generated until this November 2018. We have traced down more than 700 edits, proving there were drastic modifications to the page (vertical components of the graph). Not only users added new information to it, but also – which is something extremely interesting – deleted parts of the them, proving it is a heart-felt problem, that gather lot of people around it.
To extract these results, we used the history of the page and some tools on Google Sheets that helped us to collect all the changes occurred in terms of date and dimension (bytes). We categorized the results on Excel by change in the structure, names, position/order, creation/removal of subtopics. As a second step we created a timeline of content tables underlining the type of changes occurred to the page.
As Wikipedia is a ‘semi-scientific’ platform to which people frequently turn to in order to find information, we chose it as to try to understand how many and what kind of material users can find on the platform to get briefly informed. What’s more, as the contents are user-generated, analyzing pages and their links can help us in understanding how spread and known the topic is.
Protocol
Data
Data Source: DensityDesign
Timestamp: November 2018
View Data (500Kb)
This dataset was created with the command “importHTML” from the history section of wikipedia page: it contains the list of all the changing on the page divided by author, date and size (in bytes) of changings.