This is a network visualization of the first 100 hours of activity on English Wikipedia articles related to the Sendai, Japan earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant problems. This collaboration involved 1,727 unique editors making 6,931 contributions to 49 articles.
The red nodes are the 49 articles which were created and/or modified since 6:00am GMT on March 11. The blue nodes are unique editors. The links indicate if an editor contributed anything to that article. Every step in time represents 1 hour.
Some interesting things to point out:
1. The "halos" of small blue nodes around the articles are the editors who contributed only to that article and none of the other articles.
2. The clump of larger blue nodes in the center are editors who contributed to many of the other articles. Be sure to pay attention to when they make the switch to only editing one article to editing others. Note the switch in "attention" from the article about the earthquake & tsunami to the nuclear reactor as well as the lag before the articles about the affected communities (located at approximately 1 o'clock) are updated.
3. The article at approximately 3 o'clock is the "Fukushima I nuclear accidents" article which is created more than 48 hours after the earthquake itself.
The data was visualized using NodeXL, a free and powerful package for analyzing network data in Microsoft Excel. Get it at: nodexl.codeplex.com More information also available at: sonic.northwestern.edu/wikipedia-articles-affected-by-tohoku-earthquake/