ImpactWatch Blog

I thought that my love for Wikipedia couldn’t get any stronger, but my romance with it has taken a drastic new turn with the introduction of WikiRank.  This new app allows users to search for Wikipedia articles and then view a 30, 60, or 90 day line graph of their popularity.  The line represents the number of views for a particular article in a day’s time.

On the front page of WikiRank, the creators have chosen what they believe is a particularly interesting comparison.  From that page, users can do their own comparisons easily.  Once the topics are selected, users can view a sample from the Wikipedia article on the topic as well as see links to various outlets such as Google, The New York Times, and Twitter.  This is a great way to figure out why articles have peaks in viewership on certain days.

The creators want users to be well aware that the numbers are for “entertainment and enlightenment” purposes only.  The log program counts all single page loads, including those from Web spiders.  The creators claim that the overall shape of the increasing and decreasing line graph is more important than the exact calculations.

The user-created charts can be embedded into anything that accepts widgets, and the charts themselves are bright and colorful.  For something that only took the creators six weeks to make, I’m happy that the first version of this seems very complete.

There are two glaring issues with the application: there’s no API (yet) and the auto-completing search functionality sometimes caused me to choose the wrong article, ending in inaccurate comparisons.  The API issue is being worked on, and maybe I’m the only one having the problem with my searches.  Check it out and let me know if you have any tips or tricks for it.

Tags: widgets, wikipedia, wikirank

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 4:43 pm and is filed under Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.