WikiChanges : exposing Wikipedia revision activity

Wikis are popular tools commonly used to support distributedcollaborative work. Wikis can be seen as virtual scrapbooksthat anyone can edit without having any specific technicalknow-how. The Wikipedia is a flagship example of areal-word application of wikis. Due to the large scale ofWikipedia its difficult to easily grasp much of the informationthat is stored in this wiki. We address one particularaspect of this issue by looking at the revision history of eacharticle. Plotting the revision activity in a timeline we exposethe complete articles history in a easily understandableformat. We present WikiChanges, a web-based applicationdesigned to plot an articles revision timeline in realtime. WikiChanges also includes a web browser extensionthat incorporates activity sparklines in the real Wikipedia.Finally, we introduce a revisions summarization task thataddresses the need to understand what occurred during agiven set of revisions. We present a first approach to thistask using tag clouds to present the revisions made