WITHIN minutes of Michael Jackson鈥檚 death in June 2009, Wikipedia鈥檚 editors were updating his page. The hive of activity, as editors changed tenses, timings and circumstances of the pop star鈥檚 demise, caused on Wikipedia鈥檚 network. Such spikes could alert us to breaking news.
That鈥檚 according to Ed Summers at the US Library of Congress in Washington DC and Tom Steiner at Google in Hamburg, Germany, who believe that the rapid creation of Wikipedia content is a good way to determine newsworthiness. They have written software called Wikipedia Live Monitor that scans edits and seeks out any particularly frenzied editing sessions. It then runs a 鈥減lausibility check鈥� on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter to see if that issue is really in the news.
The software lets users determine the amount of activity needed to denote breaking news by setting the number of seconds between edits and the number of concurrent editors bashing their keyboards. Try the demo at .
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predicts it will be good at pinpointing sudden unexpected events, although whether it would work better than Twitter is debatable. The software will be presented at the World Wide Web conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, next month.
