“History Flow”:http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/index.htm is a tool created by IBM’s reseach team to study the history of collaborative documents. Specifically, they study how subjects on Wikipedia evolve over time. I found out about History Flow over at Nate Koechley’s “blog”:http://natek.typepad.com/blog/2005/01/wikis_rss_and_w.html. As the IBM folks say…

bq.. history flow provides answers at a glance to questions like, Has a community contributed to the text or has it been mostly written by a single author? How much has a particular contributor influenced the current version of the document? Is the text’s evolution marked by spurts of intense revision activity or does it reflect a smooth transition from its beginning to the present?

p. Here’s a screen shot of one of the History Flow displays for term “_Islam_”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam.

“!http://www.zoinger.com/img/history_flow.gif!”:http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/gallery.htm

This and Jon Udell’s “screencast”:http://www.zoinger.com/archives/2005/02/27/19.14.47/ looking at how the the heavy-metal umlaut page on Wikipedia evolved give a good overview on how the Wikipedia community is working.