Wikipedia lives and dies by its edits, and the process of adding information to the site is not without controversy. With debates flaring up around most pages dedicated to contentious subject matter, the edit history of the page itself can be a valuable source for points of view that don't make it into the article for long. That's the thinking behind NYU Tisch student Kate Tibbets' Wiki-History interface, which presents every edit to a page along a chronological slider.
It's based on the idea that an article's edit history contains a conversation which is vital to understanding the article's topic. The result is a teaching and research tool that resists the tendency to narrow history into an overly-simplified narrative, while remaining clear and searchable.
For now the tool only works with one page, the 2012 Doomsday Predictions article, and Buzzfeed points out that it's actually been subsumed into a broader piece on the "2012 phenomenon." While the subject matter itself is likely to become considerably less relevant to many by the end of the year, it could be the perfect way to illustrate Tibbets' point. Even if the end of the world doesn't come to pass, the topic itself will become little more than the points of view of those that were predicting it.