Live map of recent changes to Wikipedia articles (rcmap.hatnote.com)

65 points by bufo 13y ago ↗ HN

13 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 50.3 ms ] thread

this is really cool. although seeing a bunch of 503s from their geoip service. maybe hitting usage limits?

haha, yeah, we noticed freegeoip.net is effectively getting DDoS'd a few hours ago: https://twitter.com/mhashemi/status/333407761993957376

But it seemed to be holding at the time. Hopefully a local copy of the geodata will work better.

mhashemi 13y ago ↗

Backstory here: freegeoip.net has an hourly per-IP limit, so we distributed the load by doing the geolocation from client browsers. This borked freegeoip after many hours of Twitter/Ars Technica'ing.

It was a good thing Github got its storage servers back up; we're now running a local clone of freegeoip, as freegeoip.net smolders.

To freegeoip.net! May it rise again soon.

mhashemi 13y ago ↗

(N.B. for returning visitors: The sooner you force-refresh, the sooner freegeoip.net rises again.)

lake99 13y ago ↗

Yikes! This has been a revelation. I had never realized that such a large portion of the edits are malevolent. Within the first couple of minutes of using it, I saw someone replace a useful citation URL by a link to Facebook, a few instances of people inserting random words, etc.

I wonder if Wikipedia has an automated way of dealing with this.

ekr 13y ago ↗

It has some kind of anti-spam bots (and other uses). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots

simonw 13y ago ↗

It does - Wikipedia has a small army of bots which monitor and in some cases automatically revert changes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots

Here are changes made by one of the most active anti-vandalism bots:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/ClueBot_N...

tekacs 13y ago ↗

To be fair, given that this only shows unregistered edits, the proportion of malevolent edits seems... unsurprising?

MasterScrat 13y ago ↗

It'd be nice to see the Edit summary of each edit.

witek 13y ago ↗

This is so cool, love it.

chestnut-tree 13y ago ↗

This is very cool. It reminds me a bit of the "Watch people shop" feature from online bookstore bookdepository.co.uk

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/live

The sort of thing you can just sit and watch for ages.

acadien 13y ago ↗

Something almost identical to this was posted 2 or 3 days ago. I can't seem find to it now, but if I do I'll be sure to link it since maybe you and the other author would be interested in chatting.

datahipster 13y ago ↗

Ha. I actually submitted a same demo 24 hours prior to your posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5688411. At first I was mildly irritated, thinking that someone rehashed what I cooked up, but after looking at your repo, I see that you guys have been playing around with this for a few weeks, so - hooray for simultaneous discovery! :) Anyway, I really do like the rendering you guys have going on. One other thing you can do is hit the Wikipedia API to extract out the "coordinates" property for the page that was updated and show that. Make sure to change any page titles from "Talk/<Page>" to "<Page>" to pull out more relevant changes.