Press & media kit
Everything you need to write about The Planet Thinks. Free to use with credit.
The Planet Thinks is a free, open-source website that shows Wikipedia being edited in real time on a realistic 3D globe. Every few seconds someone, somewhere, edits a Wikipedia article about a place — a city, a river, a mountain, a battlefield — and it lights up on the globe exactly where that place is on Earth. The colour of each spark is the language edition it came from; click one to read the actual edit. No sign-up, no ads, no tracking.
Demo video
40 seconds, 1080p. A real screen recording of the live globe in cinematic mode, scored with the site's own generative ambient music.
Screenshots
Direct links: icon.png · screenshot-live.png · screenshot-terminator.png · screenshot-night.png · og-photos.jpg. All free to use with credit to The Planet Thinks. The photograph inside the share card is a public-domain National Park Service aerial of Liberty Island.
Fact sheet
| What it is | A live 3D globe of Wikipedia edits, in real time. |
|---|---|
| Price | Free. No sign-up, no ads, no tracking cookies. |
| Source | Open source, MIT-licensed. The deployed site runs the same code as the public repo. |
| Data | The public Wikimedia EventStreams recentchange feed, rendered within seconds of each edit. |
| Coverage | All ~300 Wikipedia language editions. Edits to articles with map coordinates (about a fifth of Wikipedia) appear on the globe; the rest feed the live counter. |
| Built with | three.js / globe.gl on the front, a small Node.js service on the back. Earth imagery is NASA's public-domain Blue Marble and Black Marble. |
| Features | Realistic day/night Earth with a live terminator, a cinematic auto-tour, optional generative ambient music, and a full-screen cinematic mode for second monitors and TVs. |
Links
- The globe (home) — the live visualization.
- Live edit statistics — how often Wikipedia is updated: edits per minute, hour and day, and the live Wikipedia edit count by language.
- How many Wikipedia articles are there — the number of Wikipedia articles, live, by language edition.
- Photos — freshly uploaded Wikimedia Commons photos, live on the globe.
- Listen to Wikipedia alternatives, tested — every live-edit tool that still works in 2026, organised by what you liked about the original, and why the editor-location maps went dark.
- OpenStreetMap live — the same globe, showing OpenStreetMap being mapped changeset by changeset.
- Your own data on the globe — drop a CSV or GeoJSON, or connect a live stream; runs entirely in the browser.
- Daily moments — a day-by-day digest of the most-edited places and the day's photos, with RSS.
- Free screensaver — run the globe as an ambient screen on a TV, second monitor, or OBS.
- Embed the live globe — a responsive iframe snippet for articles and blog posts; the globe stays live inside the story.
- Source code on GitHub — MIT-licensed.
- Product Hunt · SaaSHub · X / Twitter · Mastodon · Wikimedia Toolhub
Watch it
Every geo-located edit lights up, live, where its subject actually is on Earth. It is free, open source, and strangely calming.