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Many Eyes Wikified is a wiki, a website where anyone can edit the pages right in their browser. Wikipedia is probably the most famous example of a wiki.

You can edit pages on this site using a simple language based on WikiCreole. WikiCreole is an example of a wiki markup: a compact way to add web formatting to text. You can even edit this page if you like!

In addition to normal web page formatting (like bold text, lists, and links to other pages), Many Eyes Wikified includes some extensions to WikiCreole that enable you to place interactive charts, graphs and other views on your pages, as well as link to data from other websites.

Pages and Dashboards

Every Many Eyes Wikified page is identified by its name. For example, this page is named "Editing Help". You can visit any page by entering its name at the end of the site URL in your browser's address bar. Many Eyes Wikified pages can have any name you like, however the page name may not contain any of the following characters: "/", "{", "}", "[", or "]".

Every page on Many Eyes Wikified belongs to a dashboard. A dashboard is just a group of related pages, identified by a name. For example, this page is part of the "Main" dashboard; you can see a link to the dashboard above this page's title.

Dashboards exist to create separate namespaces for pages. This way, a user can create a separate collection of pages on a particular topic without having to worry about duplicating page names.

Each dashboard has a unique address, which becomes part of the URL for pages in that dashboard. The address doesn't need to be the same as the dashboard name, but it helps!

For example, a URL of the form: 

http://example.com/main/Main Page
points to the main page for the Main dashboard, while this URL: 
http://example.com/real_estate/Main Page
...points to the main page of a dashboard named "Real Estate".

To create a new dashboard, click "Start a new dashboard" in the menu to the left.

In order to create a new page, just put the name of the page on the end of a dashboard URL, like this: 

 http://example.com/main/My New Page Name
If your page doesn't exist, you'll be automatically forwarded to an editor so that you can create the page. You can also click on "Create a new page" in the sidebar to start editing a brand new page in the current dashboard.

Charts and graphs

Charts and graphs in Many Eyes Wikified are created just like normal wiki pages. Any page with a colon (":") in its name is treated as a visualization. Everything before the colon is the name of the data page for the visualization; everything after is the title of the visualization itself. The title can be anything you like, as long as there are no colons or curly braces in it. For that matter, any page can be the data page for a visualization; more about that in the next section.

To embed a visualization (or other sorts of content) in a page, you wrap it in at least two curly braces: { }. For example, let's say you want to embed a visualization named "SubprimeMortgages:US Map".

   {{SubprimeMortgages:US Map}}
In the actual page, this is rendered as:


This visualization doesn't exist yet.
Click the title below to create it.
SubprimeMortgages:US Map | view data

It's OK if neither "SubprimeMortgages" or "SubprimeMortgages:US Map" exist when you embed them; Many Eyes Wikified will put a placeholder there for you and try to guess the visualization type. You can click on the links in the placeholder to create the visualization and its data.

From Page to Data

By default, when you create a visualization in Many Eyes Wikified, the data for that visualization is just the raw text of the visualization's data page. However, what if you don't want all the text in a page to visualized?

When Many Eyes Wikified provides data to a visualization, it first checks the text of the page to see if there's a dataset defined in the page. You can define a page's dataset by wrapping it between a two lines of slashes, like so:

This is not my dataset.
\\\\
This is my dataset!
////
In the above example, the text "This is my dataset!" would be the data passed to the visualization, instead of the entire text.

Tables in datasets.

A blob of raw text is fine for visualizations that can extract meaning from it (such as tag clouds and word trees). But what about charts, maps, and other visualizations that expect data to be formatted in columns and rows?

A dataset can be either free text or a table. A data table consists of a single header row, followed by one or more data rows, separated by either commas (",") or tab characters ("\t").

For example: 

\\\\
Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta
1, 100, red, up
2, 300, blue, down
4, 200, green, left
3, 400, yellow, right
////
This creates a dataset containing a single table with four columns and four rows (the first line of the table is is interpreted as the names of the columns).

When Many Eyes Wikified finds a table in a dataset, it draws it as an HTML table, like so:

Data preview [view raw data]
Alpha Beta Gamma Delta
1 1 100 red up
2 2 300 blue down
3 4 200 green left
4 3 400 yellow right

Notice that Many Eyes Wikified wrapped the dataset in a gray box, so that we can easily tell what part of the page is being visualized.

When you create a visualization of a page with a dataset in it, that dataset becomes the data for the visualization. If there are multiple datasets in the page, Many Eyes Wikified will just use the first one. This can lead to fun things like pages that embed visualizations of themselves!

Editing Help:Bubble Chart | edit | view data

Live data

Sometimes, you may have data that you want to load from a different location. You can easily embed live data in a dataset by wrapping a URL in curly braces, just like you embed a visualization.

Google Spreadsheets, for example, provide a convenient way to collaboratively edit and publish data tables. To embed this spreadsheet in your wiki page: 

\\\\
  http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pczFtyXyxG0Yv87CKm48saw&output=txt
////
This is then displayed as:
Data preview [view raw data]
Content retrieved from spreadsheets.google.com at 10:04 PM EST on Tue Feb 09 2010
Alpha Beta Gamma Delta
1 1 100 red up
2 2 300 blue down
3 4 200 green left
4 3 400 yellow right
When you embed a URL in a page, the content from that URL is fetched and rendered just like a normal dataset, albeit with a label that indicates where it came from and how recently it was fetched. Any HTML tags present will be stripped out.

If a particular piece of embedded content hasn't been fetched lately, then it will be reloaded within a few seconds. You can check the label on the embedded data to find out how recently it has been fetched.

Editing a visualization

Editing a visualization is different from editing a normal page. Many Eyes Wikified uses a special editor to help you configure the visualization quickly and easily.

At the top of the editor page is the visualization type chooser. Here you can click on the icons to choose the style of chart, map or graph you want to use for this visualization.

The next section in the editor lets you set how the visualization interprets data from the page. What appears here depends on the combination of visualization and data that you choose. You can specify the types of columns in a table, or specify which column applies to a parameter in the visualization, or flip the data table so that columns become rows and rows become columns.

Finally you can customize the visualization itself. Any changes you make, such as selecting states on a USA map or changing the Y-axis attribute for a bar chart, will be saved and visible wherever you embed the visualization.