Another WikiVisualization proposal.

Introduction and justification

RecentChanges (RC) is perfectly OK for what is meant: to see what is happening in the wiki, for people that comes to it and knows about it's community dynamics.

But sometimes, you may want to explore a specific domain that is out of your usual, known field. So you may want to know, what pages are related to this concept? What is the timeline of actions around them? Who is moving these issues around? What "clusters" of pages are being generated and touched?

To facilitate this kind of exploration we need other visualization mechanisms analog to RC, but more:

Since a wiki is a constantly adapting network of people interacting with pages (with some specific actions) along time ...

wiki-elements.png

we could fold these 3 dimensions into 2, to simplify it's visualization1: time and pages, with people overlaid.

Prototype

wiki-weaving-ui-prototype.png

This is a prototype -a draft- for the user interface of such a tool, called Wiki Weaving because is makes explicit and filterable, and thus, explorable:

Explanation of the prototype

A few actions by a couple persons are shown only in this draft. Fonts and colors are not designed, just concepts, controls and interactions. Maybe the user info has more weight than ideal, but this is just a rough draft.

General ideas:

Specific filter details:

General guidelines for visual/interaction design

In the future, more projections (user/time, user/pages) could be expanded or folded to provide more insight, but this is out of this first phase.

Remaining issues

Too many, but let's start with a few... :-)

  1. Of course, 3D visualizations are great, but too heavy in resources and not needed in this case. (1)

  2. This control could be put in another group bu itself, since it is not functionally related to time, it is only there by custom use in RC (2)

MoinMoin: WikiWeaving (last edited 2007-10-29 19:08:02 by localhost)