Wikipedia, the encyclopedia of the Internet, is a constant work in progress. Its articles are being crowd-edited every minute by scores of people around the world. Now, thanks to two programmers, you can see what articles are being edited in real time, with every edit conveniently displayed on a world map.
Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi created
the map, and it's available on this website ( http://rcmap.hatnote.com/#en).
When you visit the site, the map starts live-updating any time an unregistered
Wikipedia user makes any change to one of its more than 30 million entries.
The creators of the map note that it only
displays edits made by non-registered users, which only make for 15% of the
total edits on the site. "Edits by registered users do not have associated
IP information, so the map actually represents only a small portion of the
total edit activity on Wikipedia," wrote the programmers on the site.
The map provides a fascinating peek into
what people around the globe are interested in and what they tinker with on
Wikipedia, as well as the fact that more often than not, people edit entries
that have nothing to do with where they're from.
