What’s life worth if you don’t sometimes waste a whole afternoon on Wikipedia, chain-reading entries? Not much.
But with so much information available, I sometimes have difficulty staying focused on one topic and then I start shotgunning articles left and right. Thankfully, Wikiverse comes to help put order into the chaos by displaying all the articles on Wikipedia as a tiny universe of information for you to navigate. Which is awesome.
Interconnected topics form clusters of stars, each one a single article (that will load up right in the interface if you click on it.) Each star is visually connected to related topics through colored loopy lines, so you can hop around like you would on the actual Wikipedia website. Zoom out to see how it all fits together, then zoom in for the actual information.
Wikiverse is the latest update of a 2014 Chrome experiment called WikiGalaxy, that sadly never truly took off. The software is designed by Owen Cornec, a French computer scientist who wanted to make Wikipedia more engaging. He initially tried to have star clusters color coded after which category they fit in, but there were just too much information and he ran out of colors.
So he just made different clusters stand out from each other and used colors to indicate whether an entry belonged to one cluster or another. Wikiverse also runs more smoothly than the older WikiGalaxy, even on browsers other than Chrome (I had a lot of fun on it and I run Mozilla.)
So if it’s been a long week and all you want to do is unwind, there’s now a whole universe (of information) you can explore.