An interesting series of posts over at Many-to-Many have been discussing Wikipedia and its relative merits as compared to traditional encyclopedias. Acting on the suggestion that the number of times a particular Wikipedia article has been edited is an indiciator of how reliable the information in that article might be, Clay Shirky demonstrated a script that aggregates that metadata and displays it prominently on the article. He also put out a call to convert that script into a bookmarklet. I find the idea intriguing, I have answered the call with this new bookmarklet.

Since the bookmarklet actually makes a behind-the-scenes HTTP call to wikipedia, it can be a little slow depending on the site’s response time. Maybe I’ll add some kind of “waiting…” indicator in the next rev, but for now, just hold on for a few seconds and you should see the information show up near the top of the screen.

It hasn’t yet been hammered in terms of testing, but it works for me in Firefox, Camino, and Safari on a Mac (sorry, no IE), and the numbers agree with those Clay’s script. Let me know via comments if it works for you if you try it out in any other browsers, or if you have any trouble.

To use, drag the link below onto your bookmarks or your bookmark toolbar. Then navigate to any normal Wikipedia article and click on it.

Wikipedia Edit Count