We learned about this recently released web app in a new article from The Signpost.
The publication points to a US News article from April 15.
Called Wikipedia Live Monitor, Google engineer Thomas Steiner created the tool with the hypothesis that “if a breaking news event is important, it will be reflected on at least one language edition of Wikipedia,” and “the time between when the news broke first and the news being reflected on Wikipedia is considerably short.”
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By monitoring the number of editors and edits on any given page within a short amount of time, Wikipedia Live Monitor is able to point out a number of “breaking news candidates,” which Steiner says might be more reliable than a Twitter feed.
“The main motivation of using Wikipedia instead of social media is you get a lot of events in one place—almost everything relevant in a breaking news sense has a Wikipedia page,” Steiner says.
Read the Complete Article
Learn More About Wikipedia Live Monitor in this Research Paper, “MJ no more: Using Concurrent Wikipedia Edit Spikes with Social Network Plausibility Checks for Breaking News Detection”
Thomas Steiner is a co-author of this paper.
Direct to Wikipedia Live Monitor
See Also: Wikistream (Real-Time Feed of All Wikipedia Updates, Multiple Options to Limit Stream)