A small site allows you to view all the modifications made on Wikipedia in real time. In addition to being hypnotizing, the tool allows you to discover a lot of little-known subjects.
Matthew Perry, the culture of Japan, the Thracians, Indonesian slang… Every few seconds on Wikipedia, a page is updated by an editor of the participatory online encyclopedia. To get an idea of the extent of these modifications, a small site exists: Listen to Wikipedia.
Just click on the link to understand how it works: each modification is represented by a small circle which appears on a deep blue background. The larger the circle, the more substantial the edition was (a large block of text is surely involved).
You can activate the sound at the top right and hear two different melodies:
- a slight bell sound accompanies each addition of text
- a sound of a string being “plucked” accompanies the subtraction
The larger the circle, the deeper the sound will be. As for the color of the circles, it’s simple: green is made by Internet users who are not registered on Wikipedia, and purple is for bots.
It was thanks to The Verge that we found this small site on December 8, 2023, which has in fact existed for years, but which few media outlets had reported on. The project was created by two Internet developers, nicknamed D3 and HowlerJS, and the source code is freely accessible on Github.
The joy of getting lost online
While the site may seem uninviting, it’s easy to get caught up in the game of serendipity — the act of finding something after getting lost more or less voluntarily, sometimes jumping from site to site.
Do you want to know what might have been changed on the “Year 2038 problem” page? Easy: just click on the circle in question, and you are taken directly to the page’s modification history. The most recent addition is highlighted in yellow, as usual on Wikipedia.
The page of American football player Demaryius Thomas has undergone major modifications, to add details on the circumstances of his death in 2021, when he had experienced numerous head shocks during his career.
In just a few minutes, we discover little-known subjects and intense editing battles. It should be remembered that on Wikipedia, there is no vertical governing body: it is Internet users who provide details, adding sources (videos, articles, extracts from novels) to support their demonstration.
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