Mediaboss Marketing

Wikipedia is an almost boundless source of information as close to a true compendium of human knowledge as weve ever come. Its not very pretty, though, is it? Page after page of black text on a white background, and enough hyperlinks to suck you into a never ending vortex of related articles. Rendering Wikipedia as a nebula is more befitting its true nature, dont you think? I just so happens theres a Chrome experiment that does just that, and its called WikiGalaxy.

This Wikipedia visualization was created by French computer science student Owen Cornec. Each star in WikiGalaxy is a single article on Wikipedia. Highly related articles are placed close to each other in space with connections between them. So if you click on one point of light, youll see the text of the article in the left info panel. Over on the right are all the linked articles, which show up on the map as lines connecting the points of light. Its interesting to see how wide-ranging some of the articles are. The beams of light might be confined to a little corner of the virtual galaxy on one article, then a neighboring pagehas its tendrils of influence creeping all the way across the map. To get a better feel of your meandering, you can enable the history path, which connects all the articles youve clicked on with a green line, winding through the stars.

The map view is the default mode, but you can also dive into fly mode for a more interactive experience. This places you in the middle of the galactic disc, surrounded by articles. The arrow keys move forward, back and side to side. The movement control is good enough, but anyone who has played a 4X game will be missing mouse zoom in map view. It just seems like you should be able to zoom in any out more quickly, and the buttons toward the upper left dont quite cut it.

So its neat for poking around Wikipedia in a superficial way, but what about reading articles? The preview pane on the left is okay for getting the gist, but you can click on the title for a full page version. You can read through a whole article in this view, but the lack of links and busted table formatting make it less than ideal for in-depth research. Hey, its still Wikipedia in galaxy form. What more do you want?If you would liketo simply enjoy the interface and click around, theres a button up top to turn off the UI and get all those boxes out of the way.The beta version only has 100,000 articles, but thats still a sizeable galaxy.

Cornecs next project will be to color-code the different article categories so youll be able to tell what sort of article each star represents without clicking on it. More stars should be added along the way too. While this is a Chrome experiment running WebGL and HTML5, WikiGalaxyshould work in most modern browsers. However, it might not play as nicely with Chrome on Macs. You can blame either Google or Apple for that take your pick.

Now read:Unreal Engine 3 ported to JavaScript and WebGL, works in any modern browser

Continued here:
Wikipedia has been visualized as an interactive galaxy powered by WebGL