The edit wire · Wikipedia, read live
Every edit.
As it lands.
Somebody, somewhere, is editing Wikipedia right now — this page shows you. It holds Wikimedia’s own event stream open and draws an oscilloscope across twelve language editions: one band per wiki, one spark per edit, each spark sized by the bytes it moved. Edits made by people are drawn in ink; edits made by bots — and there are a great many — are drawn dimmer, so the machine hum and the human signal read as two different things on the same trace.
Underneath the wire sits the record: the most-read articles on English Wikipedia for any day you pick, counted by the Wikimedia Feed API’s own pageviews, reaching back exactly as far as that archive answers — the last day of 2015 and no further. No key, no account, no server in the middle.
12 language editions · a 60-second window · humans in ink, bots dimmer · the reading record back to 2015-12-31
The scope
Twelve wikis on one trace.
The last sixty seconds of Wikipedia, drawn as they happen. Each band is a language edition; each vertical spark is one edit, taller the more bytes it changed. The dim sparks are bots — the stream marks them itself. Press a chip to drop a band or bring it back; the choice is remembered in this browser.
The wire
waiting for the stream
Not connected yet.
Most read
What the world was reading.
The most-read articles on English Wikipedia for the day you choose, with the view counts the Wikimedia Feed API itself reports. The archive answers back to 31 December 2015 and not a day earlier — the picker stops where the data does. A day’s count is final only after the day ends, so the freshest list is yesterday’s.
The record
not read yet
Pick a day and the list fills in.
A link to this page carries the chosen day with it.
About
A wire, not a summary.
The scope reads Wikimedia’s EventStreams service
— the public server-sent-events firehose at
stream.wikimedia.org that broadcasts every change to every
Wikimedia wiki as it is saved. This page opens one stream, keeps the
events whose server name matches one of the twelve chosen Wikipedias,
and throws everything else away in your browser. A spark’s height
is the difference between the page’s old and new length in bytes,
on a log scale; an edit the stream does not carry a length for is drawn
at the minimum height rather than invented.
Bots are drawn dimmer because the stream flags them itself
(bot: true) — that flag is the wiki’s own register of
bot accounts, so an unflagged script drawn in ink is the stream’s
call, not this page’s. When this tab is hidden the stream is
closed, not buffered, and reopened when you return; the trace starts
fresh rather than replaying a backlog that never happened on screen.
The reading list is the Wikimedia Feed API’s own most-read table, not a scrape: title, views and extract arrive exactly as the API states them. Its archive begins at the last day of 2015 — requests for earlier days return nothing, so the picker refuses them rather than pretending. What either source does not say, this page does not invent. Your chosen wikis are remembered in this browser and nowhere else.