Forum:Interwiki visualization

Dear Memory Alpha community, with the help of Łukasz Bolikowski of the University of Warsaw, we prepared a visual map of interlanguage links (or interwikis) in the Memory Alpha wiki family. We hope this will help you spot errors and gaps in the network of articles and thus raise the quality of the content.

This is based on a study of networks that Łukasz is doing. The results of his work on Wikipedia content, along with a short introduction and explanations, can be viewed at http://wikitools.icm.edu.pl/

--TOR 13:17, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

How this works
The map is divided into autonomous parts, or networks, and each network is presented in one SVG file. All of those files have been put into "Category:Interwiki visualization". You can view the files using Inkscape.

Each dot on a network graph is one article. The lines connecting the dots are interwiki links (inbound or outbound). Red lines identify an interwiki link that the script suspects to be wrong.

Some of the "wrong" links can actually be correct, and the false positives may come from different degrees of article specificity from wiki to wiki. E.g. the Polish wiki might have one article for ships named USS Enterprise, while the English wiki has one for each individual ship. These would show up in red, but can safely be ignored.

Have fun!

Questions & comments
So, if after nearly a week, no one else is going to ask, I will: other than adding a bunch of so-recognized unused files to ever growing list, what exactly is to be/can be/should be done with this? --Alan 17:18, 19 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Delete them? I don't see them really being of much use to us... though I may need their utility explained in more depth. ;) -- Renegade54 17:42, 19 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Well, we played the big guessing game on IRC when all of these files were dumped on us, and arrived at the following attempt of an explanation:
 * The individual images show interwiki connections between articles of the various MA language versions.
 * Each node is an article in one of the versions, each connector is an interwiki link between two articles.
 * Typically, we should encounter smallish clusters of nodes, where every node is connected to all others - these are the same articles in different languages. Between two of those clusters should be no connection - different articles shouldn't be interwiki'ed to each other.
 * As an example, see the image to the right. One cluster is all 2378 articles, the other cluster is all 2379 articles. The one in the middle is pl:2378-2380, with incoming connections from 2378, 2379, de:2378 and de:2379. In this case, the error depicted is the crazy naming scheme of MA/pl. In other cases, it might be "true" interwiki link errors.
 * Generally, I think there may be some one-time use for each individual image, although a running pywikipedia bot would probably be better in resolving those errors. Once an individual error is fixed though, the image has absolutely no further use and could be deleted without further discussion. -- Cid Highwind 19:15, 19 May 2009 (UTC)