Science Museum Late/Briefing/Listen to Wikipedia

Location: Maths and Computing gallery (2nd floor)

Volunteers: Hang around and look friendly. Chat to visitors about what they are seeing on screen. Explain what the circles are and what each sound indicates. Point out that this is real time information – if they were to make an edit, they would see it online!

Background: Listen to Wikipedia is an open source website written by Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi, inspired by Maximillian Laumeister's Listen to Bitcoin.

Bells are additions, strings are subtractions. The idea of the project is to show that every user makes a noise and every edit has a “voice in the roar”.

• green circles are anonymous edits (anon/bot edits represent less than a fifth of total edit traffic)
• purple circled are bots
• white circles are registered users

The visual auditory display can use data from Wikipedia in all different languages, with English Wikipedia the default selection. It can also use data from Wikidata, which gives a pleasant noise.

L2W presents all edits to the main namespace in real time, with special handling for new-user signups for good measure.

By making edits from unregistered/anonymous users green, and edits from user-driven bots purple, we hoped to give a relative visual sense of traffic from those sources.