Quantcast
ZME Science
  • News
  • Environment
  • Health
  • Future
  • Space
  • Features
  • More
    • About
    • The Team
    • Advertise
    • Contribute
    • Our stance on climate change
    • Privacy Policy
    • Contact
No Result
View All Result
ZME Science

No Result
View All Result
ZME Science
No Result
View All Result
Home Other Design

French computer scientist turn Wikipedia into an universe of knowledge. Literally

Full power to forward thrusters!

Alexandru Micu by Alexandru Micu
February 22, 2019
in Design, Home science, News, Science, Tech
Reading Time: 2 mins read
A A
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterSubmit to Reddit

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.

wikiwerse

ADVERTISEMENT

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.

Sorry to interrupt, but you should really...

...Join the ZME newsletter for amazing science news, features, and exclusive scoops. More than 40,000 subscribers can't be wrong.

   

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.)

ADVERTISEMENT

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.

Tags: datawikipediaWikiverse
ShareTweetShare
Alexandru Micu

Alexandru Micu

Stunningly charming pun connoisseur, I have been fascinated by the world around me since I first laid eyes on it. Always curious, I'm just having a little fun with some very serious science.

ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
  • News
  • Environment
  • Health
  • Future
  • Space
  • Features
  • More

© 2007-2019 ZME Science - Not exactly rocket science. All Rights Reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • News
  • Environment
  • Health
  • Future
  • Space
  • Features
  • More
    • About
    • The Team
    • Advertise
    • Contribute
    • Our stance on climate change
    • Privacy Policy
    • Contact

© 2007-2019 ZME Science - Not exactly rocket science. All Rights Reserved.