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[ba-ohs-talk] Graphing Wiki's + the Backlink DB


At 09:05 PM 12/15/01 -0800, you wrote:
>On Fri, 14 Dec 2001, Alex Shapiro wrote:
>
> > I wonder how useful the results of such a visualization would be,
> > though.  The advantage that Wiki's like Langreaiter.com has over email
> > lists, is that any time a concept is mentioned it automatically gets a
> > hyperlink.  The backlink DB however, only contains explicit
> > hyperlinks.  So, in the case where one replies to an annoucement of a link
> > without including the link itself ( for instance, this email lack(ed) a
> > link to the backlink database http://www.bootstrap.org/lists/backlinks.txt
> > ) A connection would not be made between the reply and the original post.
>
>This is now captured.  Take a look at the new backlinks.txt file at:
>
>     http://www.bootstrap.org/lists/backlinks.txt
>
>E-mail responses are marked as "emailresponse" links.
>
>-Eugene
>
>--
>+=== Eugene Eric Kim ===== eekim@eekim.com ===== http://www.eekim.com/ ===+
>|       "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they        |
>+=====  can have an excuse to drink alcohol."  --Steve Martin  ===========+    (01)


Interesting, adding emailresponse links probably will make the graph more 
connected + add context to other links that come up throughout the 
thread.  I still wonder whether such a graph would be understandable enough 
to be actively used, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.    (02)

Here are a couple of interesting pages that I found on my foray into Wiki-land.    (03)

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?VisualizeTheWiki
"The notion struck me recently that the vast DirectedGraph formed by all 
the WikiWikiWeb pages and their interconnections might be quite 
interesting. You might use GraphViz, or just collect statistics on path 
lengths and such. In particular"  -Ward Cunningham (the inventor of the 
WikiWiki concept)    (04)

Make sure to click the "visual tour" link at the bottom of the page, this 
dynamically generates a graph of the current page's 
locality.  Unfortunately though, the algorithm used traverses the link db 
by only following the links to the two "biggest" pages off a given page, so 
the graph generated is not too interesting.    (05)

Also, check out
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?LinkDatabase
"The LinkDatabase feature gives a list of all page-links in the local wiki. 
The first link on each line is to the page being searched, and the 
following links are those that were found on that page."    (06)

Following any of the links from this page produces a list that looks very 
much like the Backlink DB. It occurred to me that a quick hack in the 
spirit of Peter Jones's Backlink DB visualization could be used to generate 
a map of this list as well.  Something that particularly attracts me to 
this database is that it seems that there is an average of about 7 links, 
which should make the graph look really good in TG.  Step 2 would be modify 
the UseModWiki code, which is GPLed, to spit out a TG-XML file (with hints) 
in the spirit of memes.net.  Maybe, Langreiter-type modifications could be 
used to only spit out parts of the DB, rather then the whole thing, to make 
the whole process faster.    (07)

--Alex    (08)