Live on the globe now: 624 tracked
This layer plots Wikipedia edits onto the 3D globe the instant they're saved. Every dot is a real change — an edit or a brand-new page — pulled from Wikimedia EventStreams, the same public Server-Sent Events feed (stream.wikimedia.org) that carries MediaWiki's recent-changes firehose across hundreds of language editions. It is genuinely live: events arrive within seconds of someone clicking "Save," so the map flickers fastest when English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and other large communities are awake and busy.
Most edits carry no geographic coordinates, so we place each one near the rough centroid of its wiki's language community — an enwiki edit lights up over the English-speaking world, a jawiki edit over Japan — with a little jitter so simultaneous edits don't stack on a single pixel. It's an "edit pulse," not a precise editor location. The feed's automated canary test events are filtered out, and each point fades after about 45 seconds, leaving a rolling window of the most recent activity. Click any dot to inspect the page title, the editing user, the wiki, and whether the change was flagged as a bot. The Wikipedia pulse is one of roughly 29 live layers you can solo or combine on overwatch.earth's single interactive Earth.
Data source: Wikimedia
Wikimedia EventStreams (stream.wikimedia.org), the public recent-changes feed delivered over Server-Sent Events. It's the same firehose that powers Wikipedia's recent-changes pages, open to anyone with no key required.
It's a live stream. Edits typically appear on the globe within seconds of being saved. The layer keeps a rolling window — each edit dot fades after roughly 45 seconds, so what you see is current activity, not history.
Most Wikipedia edits include no coordinates, so we can't pinpoint editors. Instead each edit is placed near the centroid of its wiki's language community (enwiki near the English-speaking world, jawiki near Japan), with slight jitter to avoid overlap. Treat it as a pulse of where attention is, not a precise location.
It shows edits and newly created pages from the major language editions we can geolocate; very small wikis without a mapped centroid are skipped, and automated canary test events are filtered out. Bot edits do flow through — click a dot to see whether a change was flagged as a bot.