Someone in Ireland edited "Desertification". Someone in Ireland edited "Rush, Dublin". Someone in Cork (Cork, Ireland) edited "Flash-gas". Now you can get an idea of how Wikipedia changes and evolves moment by moment, country by country, and potentially even recognise current geographical trends.

The project, developed by Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi, updates live based on edits made by anonymous contributors to the online encyclopaedia. By default, the map only shows English language changes, but you can add a selection of other language Wikis too, including Spanish, French and Russian.

Another text-based site shows the contributions of registered users as well, but would likely prove overwhelming in real-time visualisation given the rapid speed at which the site changes.

Wikipedia, as described – appropriately – on the site’s page about itself, is “a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopaedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation”. Over 350 million readers access the encyclopaedia’s 26 million entries. Despite the site's popularity, the same collaborative process that has led to its wide success has also provoked criticisms about its overall reliability and accuracy.

You can view the map here.