Readership Dashboard

The Readership Dashboard combines a line graph showing the movement of Page View for a project across the years and bar graphs showing a separate variable for the same project. Selecting a project from the dropdown will update the line chart showing the movement of page views. Hover over the line graph points to see the date of observation and the corresponding value. The bars behind the line represent the selected parameters. Click on the parameter buttons to load different parameters as the background bar graph. Hover over the bars to see the date and the value. However, please note that the vertical scale of the line graph and the bar graphs are not the same.

Motion Chart

The Motion Chart is specifically capable of handling as many as five variables in an organised manner, using the following visual elements: X-axis, Y-axis, Z-axis (animated temporal transitions), size of bubbles, and colour of bubbles. It is, however, recommended that represented variables be limited to a maximum of four for easier legibility. In our case, we used the X- and Y-axes to plot various related variables (which can be selected by the user) such as New Editors and New Articles, the Z-axis to represent time, and the colour of the bubbles to represent a third optional variable (also can be selected by the user). Since different Indian language Wikipedia projects often take a wide range of values for most variables, using the size of the bubble to represent any of those variables is avoidable.

Calendar Charts

The heatmap-like Calendar Charts limits the temporal spread of data to one year for each section of the chart and uses a positionally uniform set of columns for each language so as to make reading the chart easier. Limiting each chart section to 12 months allow the user to focus on more granular movements of the variable concerned, say the number of New Editors per month. By representing each languages on an unique column, and not by an upwards-and-downwards moving line as in a line chart, makes it easier for the user to follow movements in each language (where movement is shown by the intensity of colour, as characteristic of heatmaps).

Project Pages

The Project Pages visualise each of the projects in isolation around the basic parameters to understand how they have changed/evolved over the years. We kept this as simple as possible and use straight forward line charts and bar graphs. This also ensures that the patterns are clearly evident. On the right corner of the navigation bar is the project selector. You can search or pick a project and the page will load the charts specific to that project. The chart employs filtering and dynamic scales. Dynamic scales are important because not all the projects have the same rate of growth.

#1: Visualising Basic Parameters

Understanding how the Indic or the Indian language Wikipedia projects are growing is something that we have been interested in for quite sometime. We were delighted to come across this opportunity from the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and Wikimedia Foundation. We divided our analyses into three focus areas: (1) basic parameters, (2) geographic patterns of edits, and (3) exploring the topics that receives the greatest number of edits. The existing infographics and data visualisations that we found about Indic Wikipedias mostly engaged on the first area, and also emphasised on yearly aggregates. We thought a more granular, that is monthly, understanding and a focus on the geographic and thematic spread of the edits would be very helpful to further appreciate the activities.

We began by collecting data about the following basic parameters: Number of Editors, Number of Articles, Page Views, Number of Active Editors, Number of New Articles, Number of New Editors, and Edit Size.

#2: Visualising Page Views and Project Pages

In this blog post, we bring you a visualisation of the page views statistics and the project specific pages that we created last month. The page views indicate the number of unique visits the Wikipedia project concerned has received in one month.

Unlike the basic parameters that we discussed last month, we received the Page Views data only from January 2008 onwards. The project-specific pages allow the user to see all the different variables related to a Indic language Wikipedia project in one page, thus giving a general overview of the activities in that project and their inter-relationships. Instead of comparing multiple projectsn, as in the calendar charts and motion chart discussed in the last post, the project-specific pages focus on understanding one Wikipedia project in detail.