Falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole is already tantalizing enough, but what if navigating the website felt more like traveling through the blackness of space and happening upon various information-packed planets? That would be way more fun, and also way easier to get lost in … so, I reluctantly welcome you to the Wikiverse, a new tool that might cause you to waste your entire day.
Enter the good spaceship Wikipedia and surf its pages by navigating a 3D star map. The Wikiverse is grouped into clusters, which are made up of stars; these stars represent articles, and if you click on individual specks, you can open up an article. Basically, it’s a three-dimensional, space-themed rendering of what it’s like to navigate Wikipedia.
From what I can understand, even the biggest rendering of the Wikiverse doesn’t contain the entirety of Wikipedia. There are three different “sizes” of the Wikiverse that you can select to load up and explore, and even the smallest one feels downright huge. I started out in philosophy and ended up looking at famous Shakespearian actors and then that somehow diverted me over to European politics. I could go on, but I’ll just let you explore the place yourself!
I do wish it were a little bit easier to navigate the Wikiverse; it’s certainly not as easy as Wikipedia, because it’s literally dizzying to pore over articles in this fashion. Conceptually, though, I love the Wikiverse, and I would love to see more websites take on this structure, even just as an art project as opposed to a useable resource.
For example, I’d like to be able to map out my frequently-read news sites or my RSS feed and find new reading material that way. Every journalist could be their own star system, surfacing different links to new places. Or, if we really want to create the ultimate time-waster here, how about turning TV Tropes into its own universe? That could provide endless browsing power … but maybe that’s not a good thing.
(via The Verge)
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