Epicpedia was a graduation work made in 2008 by then Networked Media student Annemieke van der Hoek. Annemieke would present the work, in collaboration with her sister as a theater performance and discussion at the VJ12 festival in Brussels, Nov 2009 (summary).
This sketch revisits the original idea at the core of the project: though we tend to read Wikipedia articles as a unified linear text representing the latest revision, they are in fact are written in a much more conversational manner with often thousands of individual edits, corrections, deletions, and contestations. All these edits are (meticulously) tracked and are made publically available when one views the history of an article. Besides the edits themselves, edits are associated with the user account or IP address (if made anonymously) of the author, a timestamp, as well as an optional comment, often the justification of the edit, and a flag for whether or not the edit was is considered “minor”.
A wikipedia edit may be small, as in fixing a typo, or large, such as the addition of a new section, or contentious, such as changing existing wording to reflect a different point of view. No matter the size or intent, however, each edit contains a collection of meta-data about the edit. In Epicpedia, this meta-data was likened to the meta-text of a stage play, ie the stage directions, and other texts in a screenplay besides the actual lines that are spoken. In invoking the figure of Berthold Brecht, and the ideas of Epic Theater, a parallel is made between the intents of Brechtian “distancing” as a means of heightened engagement with a theater piece through an acknolwedgement of its construction and artificiality, with the experience of engaging with a contemporary web publishing platform such as Wikipedia.
Let’s consider this article on the english language Wikipedia about recent Nobel prize for Literature winner Han Kang:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Kang
Looking at this articles history, we can go back in time (click on “oldest” near the bottom) to find that the article was created in August 2010:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Han_Kang&oldid=376586279
Note that when you click on “View history”, the URL changes to reveal the actual underlying URL structure. The URL of the api is the same, just replace “index.php” with “api.php”.
The original was based on server-side python scripts.
Following example begrudginly given here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52283962/how-to-find-textual-differences-between-revisions-on-wikipedia-pages-with-mwclie
So the standard (action-based) mediawiki API provides a Compare action.
The examples given on API:Revisions page, show for instance how to access the last 5 edits of an article:
or the first 5 edits:
The code we will use also makes use of the URLSearchParams class in js.
We will also make use of the mediawiki’s Revisions API
Adding ids and flags
adapted to Han Kang’s entry on wikipedia (note the change of host!)…
See: epicpedia_2024.
Rhetorical spaces… are fictive but not fanciful or fixed locations, whose (tacit, rarely spoken) territorial imperatives structure and limit the kinds of utterances that can be voiced within them with a reasonable expectation of uptake and “choral support”: an expectation of being heard, understood, taken seriously. They are the sites where the very possibility of an utterance counting as “true-or-false” or of a discussion yielding insight is made manifest. Some simple examples will indicate what I mean the term to achieve….
Imagine trying to make a true statement about whether it is more convenient to fly into Newark or La Guardia airport in the year 1600. The statement would not be false but meaningless: it could neither be true nor false within the available discursive possibilities. Or imagine trying to have a productive public debate about abortion in the Vatican in 1995, where there is no available rhetorical space, not because the actual speech acts involved would be overtly prohibited, but because the available rhetorical space is not one where ideas on such a topic can be heard and debated openly, responsively…
What I want this terminology [rhetorical space] to do [is], namely to deflect the focus of philosophical analysis away from single and presumably self-contained propositional utterances pronounced by no one in particular and as though into a neutral space; and to move it into textured locations where it matters who is speaking and where and why, and where such mattering bears directly upon the possibility of knowledge claims, moral pronouncements, descriptions of “reality” achieving acknowledgment, going through. Often in such spaces discourse becomes a poiesis, a way of representing experience, reality, that remakes and alters it in the process. And the making is ordinarily a communal process, dependent for its continuance on receptive conditions, on engaged responses both favourable and critical. (p. x )
In the video summary (by Maniseng Peng and Petar Veljacic)
There’s a quote from Brecht:
Society cannot share a common communication system so long as it is split into warring factions.
Femke’s comment on exploring the space of what knowledge is able to be created..
Trying to define what is knowledge; so people invest time and energy in this , which is it’s own tragedy in a way… what i miss, in your presentation and in the discussion, is an anlaysis of the reality and the space that wikipedia itself is.
Use momentjs to format relative times?