A Wiki History of World Events in 100 seconds

In January, Gareth Lloyd and Tom Martin produced the Best Visualization at Matt Patterson's History Hackday by visualizing the History of the World using 14,000 events from the English Wikipedia.  These were all events that their parser could match to both a date and a geocoordinate.  The result is this gorgeous (CC-SA) animation, in which continents slowly emerge over time : 




A History of the World in 100 Seconds from Gareth Lloyd on Vimeo.


Guillermo Carvajal summarizes the results:

Podemos ver como la mayoría de documentos entre ese año y 1492 corresponde a Europa, con algunos pocos emergiendo en Asia. Hacia 1492, con la llegada de Colón a América, comienza a aparecer gran actividad en el continente americano.

Elegant visual snapshots of expanses of knowledge

The ideal of beautiful print editions of article collections has inspired generations of Wikipedians, like centuries of encyclopedists before them.

German Wikipedia enthusiasts first took single topics and made WikiReaders out of them, finding a national publishing house willing to bind and distribute the results under the "WikiPress" label. They even considered printing a keywords and short descriptions for the entire encyclopedia, though that did not come to fruition.

Then in 2008, Håkon Lie (the original proposer of CSS, and a font and layout geek) spent time making his Prince XML tool generate beautiful PDFs out of Wikipedia pages. He has also dreamed of printing summaries of all Wikipedia articles in the style and layout of a traditional encyclopedia, and has joined our offline-wp mailing list.

PrinceXML's layout of the Norway article

And today Stefan Kuhn shared his latest script, called simply "The Book", which generates a multi-column view of a set of articles, with thumbnails and a bit of text. Like the short well-attributed summaries produced by Magnus's tool that I reviewed earlier, these efforts all try to convey the beauty and detail of a large work in a simple package.

The Book: Kinosch – Kirk Hammett from the Luxembourgish Wikipedia

What are your favorite print layouts for dense knowledge? What variations on the "Wikipedia 1.0" and printed Wikipedia theme would you like to see come to pass?