In partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation, we are pleased to announce the winners of WikiViz 2011, a visualization contest focused on exploring how Wikipedia, in concert with other open data sources, has made the world a better place. The contest solicited “the most effective, compelling, and creative data-driven visualizations of how Wikipedia impacted the world with its content, culture, and open collaboration model” (from the WMF’s announcement).
The winner is: Jen Lowe of Datatelling with “A Thousand Fibers Connect Us — Wikipedia’s Global Reach”. Click the title to explore the Jen’s visualization.
Congratulations to Jen! And thanks to our jury: Moritz Stefaner of Well Formed Data, Kim Rees of Periscopic, Andrew Vande Moere of KU Leuven and Information Aesthetics, Erick Zachte of WMF, and Gregorio Convertino of PARC.
It’s a very pretty graph, but rather difficult to read. It took me at least a couple of minutes to work out what statistics it was actually expressing, what the colours and the length of the lines meant. But now I have I do think it’s pretty cool.