

Show HN: Weekend project – StumbleUpon For Wikipedia - negamax
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wiki-roller/ncnhlkjnejdecdkjjdidclcgmhgfcmkn

======
ZeroGravitas
There's several resources, both internal and external to Wikipedia, that could
be used to jump start a collection of "interesting" rather than random pages
e.g.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:FA-Class_articles>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unusual_articles>

[http://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/top/?sort=top&t=all](http://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/top/?sort=top&t=all)

<http://www.samdowning.com/interesting-wikipedia-articles/>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GA>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles>

~~~
negamax
Thanks. Very helpful links. Some really great feedback for the tiny project. I
be adding more functionality. Specially the "Interesting" and "Category
Selection" for now. If you have some ideas about navigation. Please do share
those.

------
petercooper
Building a Chrome extension is a good learning process so congratulations for
that. I love going through random Wikipedia pages. More generally though, if
"in your bookmarks bar" is good enough rather than next to the address bar,
one could drag this link in and rename it:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random>

~~~
negamax
That's pretty cool. I built a backend with titles list etc. It seems in vain
now. Hehe :). Any suggestions to make stumbling Wikipedia more meaningful?

~~~
lrm
I think your extension could provide value if people could choose a field of
interest. Like if I could stumble through articles about China or about
animals or even about broad things like people or places, that would be neat.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Maybe a Bayesian filter (or some analogous technique) that found "interesting"
articles?

~~~
negamax
This didn't crossed my mind at all. I wonder if extension should add an upvote
button to Wiki page and use that for interesting?

~~~
petercooper
Ah yes, didn't see this comment before I wrote my last one. But exactly, that
would certainly be interesting if you got enough users to make the results
meaningful (or perhaps curated a large bunch yourself initially).

Another thing that might be handy for something like this _long term_ is
making sure I don't see the same page more than once. But that would be a lot
more data for you to store.

~~~
Turing_Machine
I'd rather have it tailored to my personal taste instead of a community thing,
myself.

------
Hupo
Nothing against building Chrome extensions here either (hell, I started
learning JavaScript with userscripts myself), but Wikipedia has indeed had a
"Random article" feature for the longest time, and it's right there in the
main navigation too: <http://puu.sh/1BQ3O>

------
maxmcd
Not to be too critical, but wouldn't the helpful StumbleUpon component here,
(especially to differentiate it from the random Wikipedia page bookmark) be
the ability for the extension to show random articles based on your personal
preferences?

~~~
negamax
Hey. Thanks for the feedback. I think ability to select interests be a great
addition. Working towards that.

~~~
colinwinter
I don't think its so much about adding interests as it is offering random but
related articles to what someone views. Not everyone always checks the related
articles section- and that section is not always very comprehensive. It'd be a
good start to use that section though, and compensate by eliminating pages
you've already visited.

I really like your idea, although the implementation still needs the actual
recommendation engine. Wikipedia could really benefit from more related
articles being listed/organized.

------
seanp2k2
Is this more than just (OSX-only)

    
    
      open 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random'
    

? I haven't installed it yet, but the above should get you a random Wikipedia
page.

------
zerop
I would like to see it for Quora.

~~~
codezero
Already exists: <http://www.quora.com/shuffle>

