A new live-data version of WikiDashboard for Wikipedia

The ASC group (and Bongwon Suh in particular) is pleased to announce a new version of WikiDashboard for Wikipedia. In this new version, we have:

* Live Information!
WikiDashboard now uses the live feed of English Wikipedia powered by MediaWiki Toolserver. The dashboard will show any changes made on each page almost instantly. Note that the earlier version has been showing information as of April 2008. For example, you can see who’s been active in pages such as: Sarah Palin’s page or the US President Election page.

Notice in particular how Sarah Palin’s edits really only picked up in the last 6-8 weeks, but User Ferrylodge had edited her page around July 1, before the Aug. 29th nomination.

Unfortunately, because the Toolserver is not very reliable on our queries, we are not always able to serve up live edit data in our dashboard. If you don’t get a live dashboard, you can either get at the data from April 2008 that is on our own private database server, or you can wait a while and try again.

* Browse Through Time
Now, you can click on the bars in the dashboard. Clicking on an bar will bring you to the wiki historical context when the edits were made. For Article Dashboard, the system will show all the edits made on the page around the time point you choose. For User Dashboard, WikiDashboard will provide a list of edits that the user made around the time you clicked.

Please let us know if you find any problem or have any feedback. Thanks!