g-osc visualisations
November 1, 2009
During the third week in the open source course, the students were asked to develop any type of visualisation using processing.js for our g-osc wiki which is powered by mediawiki.
I suggested the use of the Mediawiki API which can be used to get some interesting data from any instance of media wiki, for example, list of pages, history of pages, list of users, their contributions and more.
Three of my students worked on “Blogs on Blobs” which gives a cute burst of bubbles that can be moved around. Each blob has the name of a specific blog. When you click on a blob, it opens the related blog. This is a demo of it, try it on firefox.
If you try to view it in google’s Chrome, you will not see the text. Saher El-Neklawy grabbed my attention that this is a problem with processing.js since the text doesn’t appear in chrome. You will also notice that in chrome, the blobs are moving really really fast 
In my discussion with saher, he associated this to the speed of Chrome’s V8 compared to firefox’s spider monkey, but is it really? I feel I am missing something here 
Another very interesting visualisation shows all the wiki pages, their relationships and history. As you can
see in this demo, all the pages are visualised as nodes with edges connected linked pages to each other. You can play around with the nodes with a speed that gives you an intuitive feeling of interaction If you click on a node, the details of the page and the contributors will appear in another view. Very cool guys One of the team members blogged about this experience which appears to have been somehow unpleasant
We have more visualisation, yet non interactive. For example, visualising members’ contributions to the wiki or the daily activities of the wiki as bar charts.
A great thing about these visualisations is that they can be used with any instance of mediawiki. So, they are actually a contribution to the mediawiki community.
Again, well done to everyone who contributed to this work.
I am very happy my students are more and more involved in the real worl. Good job everyone.
