From the about page:
wikistream is an experimental visualization of realtime edits in major language Wikipedias. Every time someone updates or creates a Wikipedia article you will see it ever so briefly in this list. And if someone uploads an image file to the Wikimedia Commons you should see the image background update.
If you’d like to pause the display at any time just hit ‘p’. To continue scrolling hit ‘p’ again. If you hover over the link you should see the comment associated with the change.
Hopefully wikistream provides a hint of just how active the community is around Wikipedia. wikistream was created to help recognize the level of involvement of folks around the world, who are actively engaged in making Wikipedia the amazing resource that it is.
wikistream was also an excuse to experiment with node.js and redis. node connects to the Wikimedia IRC server, joins the wikipedia channels and pushes updates into redis via pub/sub, which the node webapp is then able to deliver into your browser through the magic of socket.io If you are curious, want to add/suggest something, or run the app yourself, checkout the code on GitHub
I’m not sure if this is eye-candy or something different.
Could be a testing stream (low-speed) for unpredictable content to be integrated into larger whole.
Could be navigational exercise of data or those editing the data.
Could be filtering exercise.
Could be identification exercise, across multiple natural languages.
Or, could be something completely different. What do you think?