I put together two more Wikipedia word clouds, in part because I wanted an excuse to work on my Python coding skills, and in part because I enjoy word clouds as an interesting visualization. For these word clouds, I used a Python script to organize the information I scraped from the Wikipedia Zeitgeist page (see prior post for link). The resulting file listed the titles of articles and the number of times each article had been edited for the month(s) it had made the list. By running this file through the Wordle software, I was able to produce a word cloud that displays the titles with their relative sizes determined by the number of edits they had received in a single month.
The image above shows that the Wikipedia article on the Virginia Tech Massacre probably has the largest number of edits in a single month for any one English Wikipedia article, though if you look closely (click through to the larger size on Flickr) you can see some articles, like the one on George W. Bush, represented by many smaller entries in the word cloud. This represents the many months that the George W. Bush article was one of the most edited articles on the English Wikipedia, even though it was never edited nearly as many times in a single month as the Virginia Tech Massacre article.
Here is the same data, with some of the less-edited articles left out. The result is less visually impressive, but a little more legible.
Next, I'll modify my script to count up all the edits and display a cloud showing which titles are the most edited articles on the English Wikipedia ever!
