Wikipedia reads as a neutral territory. As readers we know that humans are continually editing Wikipedia, that facts change, that it’s a so-called “living” encyclopedia. Yet when we look at Wikipedia, we only see a static moment, frozen in time. What happens to these edits? Despite the static quality of its appearance, having multiple contributors to documents which report the truth naturally implies that people will disagree on truths!

Indeed, Wikipedia articles are secretly the battlegrounds for ideological debates in all fields, from details about pop stars to contested facts the natural sciences. One professor recently told me a strategy that I thought was brilliant; by logging into Wikipedia and viewing the edit history of a page, you can see where the contested debates in a field are happening. However, this “edit history” view is distinct from the article itself and laden with detailed information.

What if we could see qualities of these debates overlaid on the article itself? What could this tell us about all kinds of fields and objects of study, as well as the community that works on wikipedia?

I would like to develop a simple tool that looks like a heat map overlay on top of a wikipedia article that can show the frequency of edits on the article. In a full version of this tool, a user could click on the heat map to look at the specific information that was changed. Users could set the timeline range (i.e. look at the edit heat map of the article over the past week, over the past five years, etc.) to build understandings of these changing debates.