On the Analysis of Wikipedia Activity through Time

Wikipedia articles see bursts of update activity whenever a topic is of more interest to the community or has somehow become controversial. Analyzing when and what changes are made can, thus, give us an idea of how the community feels about particular subjects. In this paper we present Pop Culture, a system that provides a visualization of Wikipedia´s edits that allows us to reflect on how different subjects are perceived by people over time and, by comparing articles from different language wikipedias, find regional and cultural differences of interest and perception. A set of user studies shows that, indeed, users are able to use Pop Culture effectively and efficiently to find such trends and differences.