Listen to Wikipedia

September 4, 2019 7:25 PM

Listen to Wikipedia:

Listen to the sound of Wikipedia's recent changes feed. Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note. Green circles show edits from unregistered contributors, and purple circles mark edits performed by automated bots. You may see announcements for new users as they join the site, punctuated by a string swell. You can welcome him or her by clicking the blue banner and adding a note on their talk page.

posted by XtinaS (15 comments total)

Previously.
posted by zamboni at 7:34 PM on September 4, 2019

well yeah but that was like six years ago, or one century in internet time
posted by XtinaS at 7:35 PM on September 4, 2019 [2 favorites]

You can click on a circle and it takes you to that edit.
posted by hypnogogue at 7:36 PM on September 4, 2019

“Every something is an echo of nothing”
John Cage
posted by Ahmad Khani at 7:40 PM on September 4, 2019

A neat best-of would be to extract out the edit wars around specific pages, like a back-and-forth across the Greek border about the article on North Macedonia.
posted by Space Coyote at 7:53 PM on September 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

I love it. I love all passive audio interfaces.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:00 PM on September 4, 2019

Challenge: Create a MeFi Music composition based on the feed, with each movement from the activity for a different controversial article.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:02 PM on September 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

imagine the sound of the old megathreads
posted by Ahmad Khani at 8:40 PM on September 4, 2019 [2 favorites]

From the descriptions I've seen (ex. "relitigating the primaries"), that might get a bit circular and monotonous.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:46 PM on September 4, 2019

imagine the sound of the old megathreads

From the descriptions I've seen (ex. "relitigating the primaries"), that might get a bit circular and monotonous.

Minimalism with randomness and repetition taken to the point of meaninglessness. Truly good minimalism builds on itself, but what happens in comment threads here always goes back to A and tries to evolve into B but maybe doesn't and like I can't even continue.

Also, MAYBE it would be interesting sonically. A lot of repeating themes with slight variations of notes... Oddly spaced so surprising but maybe fun? Depends on how much repetition is going on... and how often repeating.
posted by hippybear at 10:41 PM on September 4, 2019

I'm surprised this is possible on volume grounds; if someone had asked I would have guessed way more edits per time period than this is displaying.
posted by Mitheral at 11:30 AM on September 5, 2019

one of my long-time favorite tools.

wish there was an MP3 version!
posted by rebent at 7:24 PM on September 5, 2019

I just listened and found it soothing. Looking at it, it seems the presidential approval rating article is being hit a lot. Go figure....
posted by kathrynm at 7:15 AM on September 6, 2019

You can click on a circle and it takes you to that edit.

For some reason I read this as "takes you to hell" and I was like, yeah, I imagine, getting into a detailed back and forth about editing a controversial wikipedia entry as a kind of hell.

This is really cool though. It is oddly soothing.
posted by Fizz at 6:15 AM on September 10, 2019

When I worked at a big tech company, I wanted to do a translation of our log monitoring into nature sounds. Successful transactions would be birds chirping. Overnight cron jobs running would be crickets. The level of CPU and memory load on the servers would determine the level of the wind and rain. An error would be heard as the snapping of a twig.

When everything was working normally, the sound would naturally follow daily and seasonal cycles. When something was badly wrong, things would be ominously quiet, or catastrophically loud.
posted by mbrubeck at 6:54 AM on September 10, 2019 [1 favorite]