In a super clever stroke, TCD student Stephen Dolan has created a tool that works out the shortest path between two articles on Wikipedia. Example:

Shortest path from Bertie Ahern to corruption
Bertie Ahern
Tribunal of Inquiry Into Certain Planning Matters and Payments
Corruption

2 clicks needed

ZING!

Now go play with it yourself: Six degrees of wikipedia.

• Super hero Darragh Doyle chats to PJ Gallagher.
• Busker TV: They go around filming buskers in Dublin. Youtube channel. Myspace page.
• Green ink gives a summary of his conquering of Google image search for Irish politicians. Great work.
• Vodafone to offer fixed-line and broadband service. When will they start to treat their mobile broadband with respect and charge sensible rates?
• Kevin Myers on wikipedia in todays Independent.
• Vote Maybe (pictured above) - Graffiti in Galway. Photo taken by Dunkoman.

Someone in Ireland updated the entry for Helix on wikipedia.

We’re a nation of saints and scholars, for sure.

Some stuff that anonymous Irish wikipedia editors have been up to over the past while:

Someone edited the Inchicore entry to point out that: Inchicore is full of junkies.

One Irish sole edits the Heather Locklear entry: Locklear dated Tom Cruise and Scott Baio and schtuped many others (too many to mention) I mean come on, who wouldn’t hit that???

Robbie Williams: apparently he once bummed an antelope.

Soccer Dog: European Cup: This movie was controversial for the inclusion of several nude scenes.

Enniskerry: The Clock Tower in the middle of the village was inspired by the Lord Of The Rings all seeing Eye Of Gondor.

Some hilarious Irish wikipediar edited the entry for Contract. The original was:

Perhaps the most important feature of a contract is that one party makes an offer for a bargain that another accepts. This can be called a ‘concurrence of wills’ or a ‘meeting of the minds’ of two or more parties.

And it was changed to:

Perhaps the least important feature of a contract is that one party makes an offer for a giraffe that another desires. This can be called a ‘concurrence of rhinos’ or a ‘meeting of the hippos’ of two or more parties.

The sheer scale of the wit of these people makes the mind boggle.

What is WikiCraic?

Some stuff that anonymous Irish wikipedia editors have been up to today:

Above: An Irish person updated the name attribute above the poster.

Dave Fanning: In 1980, Fanning won a Jacob’s Award for his RTÉ 2fm music show.Yeah it was shite.

Katy French: She never really died.

And finally, on the entry for the Oregon-grape, vandalism so obvious and stupid one of Wikipedia’s automated bots found it and reverted the page. See here.

Previously:
WikiCraic: Tracking Wikipedia vandalism of Mary Robinson’s entry
Original WikiCraic post.

WikiCraic [it's on the right of this post], limited though it may be, is fun to refresh from time to time and see what’s hot on Wikipedia. Some enterprising person just edited Mary Robinson’s entry.

Have a look at the changes. Basically they changed ‘The Irish Times‘ ‘to ‘The Modern Gay Times‘ and ‘International Institute for Environment and Development‘ to ‘Dude, where’s my car for Environment and Development.’ Hilarious.

But what is incredible is that the vandalism was corrected within a minute. Which is why wikipedia always amazes me.

Original WikiCraic blog post.

If you look to your right you should see WikiCraic, a little program I wrote up.

What is it?
When it’s loaded [and you can reload it by hitting Check Again] it scans the Recent Changes page at Wikipedia for IP Addresses. It does a lookup to see if a particular IP Address is from the Irish range and if it is displays the page title and link.

Whose idea did you steal?
WikipediaVision is a much cooler app that does the above on a global scale, and then mashes the results up with Google maps for a really cool almost-realtime visualisation of anonymous edits going on all over the world. I liked the idea, but in a somewhat creepy way I’m much more interested in spying on my neighbours. So hence the idea was born. I read his FAQ to get an idea for how he did it, and then implemented it in PHP, using a screen scraper and the same offline GeoLocation database from MaxMind that WikipediaVision used.

Why does it only show anonymous edits?
Because wikipedia only displays the IP addresses of anonymous edits - the IPs of registered users are hidden.

Is it accurate?
I’m not entirely sure. I don’t know how accurate the MaxMind IP range data is. I don’t know a lot of things. Also, apparently there’s loads of quirks in the IP address ranges used by Irish people. e.g. Some NTL ones show up as UK.

Disclaimer
This is just for fun. And if the links on the right show something awful; then oh well that’s life, I accept no responsibility for the contents of those links.

Making it better.
You could actually set this up to run repeatedly and store the info in a database, so you could see edits flying around. It would be great for example, if someone was in the news, to see a huge upsurge in edits to his page. I’m not sure I like the idea of ripping data from wikipedia and storing it long term though.

Was this the best way to do this?
No idea. Maybe wikipedia has RSS feeds available by location, I don’t know. That’s not why I did it; it was just a fun exercise.

There you go. If it ends up being complete jazz I’ll remove it, but I hope it’ll throw up the occasional gem or random insight for whoever happens to see it.