
A Wikipedia Reader for iOS that visualizes the connections between articles - andymangold
http://www.wikiwebapp.com/
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gojomo
Force-directed graphs (as in the WikiWeb "node view") tend to fascinate but
then frustrate me.

They _seem_ to show so much, in the relative placement/distances/angles of
nodes and edges. But when you get right down to it, almost all that eye-
catching detail is random noise. The same "spokes" could be in any radial
order. The relative above/below/right/left positioning could be reversed with
no loss of meaning. Often dragging a cluster can result in a completely
different set of 'nearnesses'. And as andymangold mentions elsewhere in this
thread, for WikiWeb even the set of nodes that are expanded from any origin
are randomly chosen... so you can't even follow the same path twice.

So these graphs _tempt_ with their visual connotation that they are
information-dense and stable like a real map, but then turn out to be
splatter-art, pretty but with most of the ink being random noise.

These problems might be fixable with extra layout constraints. What if shorter
articles were always up and longer ones down? More-inlinked to the left and
less-inlinked to the right? What if edge lengths or thicknesses were
correlated to other notions of bidirectional similarity? Of course doing this,
in an automated fashion that continues to look nice and meaningful in every
corner of the dataset, is quite hard.

Something forcing a little more of a 'tree' feel, at least when moving in
certain directions, could help pack more deterministic meaning and text into a
small area. (Think vague intimations of Miller Columns within a rendered
graph.)

~~~
andymangold
Thanks for taking the time to write this out, Gordon.

One of our biggest concerns with the node view was that it would imply more
significance than is actually present, as you mention. Like you point out, the
radial order of the nodes, their relative proximity, and which nodes are
actually shown are completely arbitrary. At the end of the day, you're right:
it is far more aesthetic than it is informative.

However, we do think there is something to be said for aesthetics and how the
app feels. Our goal was not to expose all sorts of new data and information,
but rather to make the browsing of Wikipedia more fun. While I concede the
node-view does not convey a whole lot of meaning, my hope is that is
stimulates curiosity and delights the user.

~~~
teeja
Couple the nodes with AI that learns what the user is interested in, however,
and the user can create meaning for themselves. No 'authoritative source' has
ever created -that- kind of freedom.

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jmduke
The app itself looks gorgeous, but I dont understand the primary use case.
I've been writing papers and researching for years now, and I've never found
the little idea cloud thing -- it seems more like a way to connect suspects in
cop movies than an actually helpful way of visualizing discrete data.

~~~
Angostura
Indeed. I watched the video on the front page, and I couldn't work out how the
application was actually helping the end user. I couldn't work out what the
chap with the pins and string was actually trying to accomplish either.

Consequently my money remained in my pocket.

~~~
joshhepworth
The app is about exploring new information, drawing the user towards
connections he or she doesn't yet understand. We wanted a way to encourage
ourselves to explore Wikipedia further than we already do, to satisfy our
curiosity or simple desire to learn something new.

We also highly valued the reading experience and put just as much effort into
making the presentation of the content better as developing the web.

However, that's not going to be for everyone. It's been a joy for us, and
we're simply hoping others will find value there as well.

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d5tryr
It's extremely pretty, though I question some of the UX desicisions.

Double-tapping an item makes it vanish. Due to the seemingly random selection
of nodes that appear when re-searching for a parent node, that item may never
be seen again...

Seems odd that a gesture like double-tapping, while not often used in iOS,
would result in the exact opposite action of the familiar double-clicking to
drill down or expand of other UIs.

~~~
andymangold
Thanks for taking the time to leave some thoughtful feedback.

To pull back the curtain a bit, you are right that the nodes that show up when
a parent node is tapped are randomized. As you can imagine, many Wikipedia
pages have thousands of links which would be unwieldy for both the hardware
and the user. For this reason, we gave up on the idea that users would be able
to search for a specific page through the node view. Our hope is that someone
who is looking for a specific page will use the search feature, while the
node-view will be used for more serendipitous browsing.

As far as the double-tapping is concerned, you may be right about it not being
intuitive. It will be interesting to see what people's reactions are. We
decided to go with it because, like you mentioned, it is one of lesser used
gestures in iOS, and deleting a node is the least important way to interact
with it. We felt that expanding and bringing up the article itself were more
important, so we tied them to the more standard gestures.

~~~
bryanjclark
I also found the double-tap-to-delete counterintuitive. If a single tap
expands a node, then a double-tap should open the article. Tap-and-hold to
delete is a bit more intuitive, too -- it's the same gesture you'd use on your
iOS home screen to delete an app.

That said, this is a beautiful app!

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robinhouston
It reminds me a little of the Web Stalker, an experimental web browser from
1997: <http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=7>

~~~
taliesinb
It's interesting how often ideas have to happen at the right _time_ to really
work. Light Table is another example of a set of ideas that was waiting for
the right conditions to reincarnate.

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zatara
If you want something like this, but more generic than Wikipedia-only, have a
look at PersonalBrain (<http://www.thebrain.com/>, no iPad version?). To be
honest, I could never make it work for my main intended use (academic papers &
citations), but I really think it is a cool app with lots of potential.

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taliesinb
For anyone who is interested, I've written a parallelized Wikipedia spidering
tool in Go: <https://github.com/taliesinb/wikispider>

It's for when you want to grab a small portion of the full Wikipedia graph
without cutting yourself on the 30-odd gigabytes of XML the dumps provide.

~~~
mysterywhiteboy
Does it crawl revision history as well? I can deal with the gigabytes - it's
the terabytes that scare me! (i.e full revision dumps).

~~~
taliesinb
So you want a small sub-graph of Wikipedia, but you want the full revision
history of each of the articles in that sub-graph? I don't think the MediaWiki
API makes it possible to get the full revision history of an article as a
single object, so you're probably better off operating on a dump.

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xlance
Found this while searching for "Six degrees of Wikipedia"

<http://www.thewikigame.com>

~~~
Lockyy
Reminds me that if you keep clicking the first link (ignoring anything in
brackets) of the article on a wikipedia page you will eventually hit
philosophy and then get in a 3-4 page loop.

edit: Having just checked, the loop is now a 2 page loop between reality and
philosophy.

~~~
kgermino
I just tried it beginning with the article on HN and ended up in a 9 article
loop beginning with science.

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Lockyy
Hacker news -> Social News -> Website -> Web page -> Document -> WordNet ->
Lexical database -> Lexical resource -> Lexicon -> Linguistics -> Science ->
Knowledge -> Fact -> Proof (truth) -> Argument -> Philosophy -> Reality ->
Philosophy

How did you get stuck in science? That's actually quite a long route to
philosophy, when I've done this before it's usually a lot faster.

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smackfu
I've tried a few Wikipedia apps... I always end up not using them since I find
Wikipedia pages via Google and there is no way to redirect you from the web to
an app. (Wikipedia could choose to do it on their end but they don't.)

~~~
justincrane
How is Wikipedia supposed to know you'd like to be redirected to some random
app downloaded from an app store?

There actually is a way to redirect from the web to a random app (intents on
Android) but that's not available on iOS. Lay the blame at Apple's feet not
Wikipedia's.

~~~
smackfu
It is available on iOS, for instance Quora pages you open in Mobile Safari
will have a link to open in the Quora app. But it has to be provided by the
site working together with the app.

Details: [http://mobiledevelopertips.com/cocoa/launching-your-own-
appl...](http://mobiledevelopertips.com/cocoa/launching-your-own-application-
via-a-custom-url-scheme.html)

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pohl
Does anybody know (or is anyone willing to guess) whether the force-directed-
layout is done by some available library or whether they rolled their own?

~~~
joshhepworth
We rolled our own physics to get the layout in the node view to a point that
felt right.

~~~
pohl
Well done. It's fun to play with. I like the little earthquake a node does
when it's about to expand.

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hhimanshu
I like it, never seen that before with wiki articles

~~~
nchaimov
There was a program like this, specifically for Wiki articles, for Mac OS X,
called Pathway, but it seems to have been abandoned. It hasn't been updated
since 2007.

<http://pathway.screenager.be/download>

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chuinard
This same feature has been known as a 'LinkMap' in the Encyclopaedia
Britannica app. I wonder if they took the idea from Britannica.

~~~
andymangold
We had not seen that before, but it is pretty similar. Thanks for sharing!

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lancewiggs
As nobody said it yet. I'm always very wary of phrases like "a portion of all
proceeds will be donated...", and in this case it caused me to stop looking.
The reason is that we don't know how generous or not that portion is, and what
the definition of Proceeds is. Better to state that clearly as in "20% of the
price". It doesn't have to be a large percentage, but we do need to see it as
fair.

~~~
andymangold
I'm glad you brought this up, Lance. Frankly, I'm surprised that no one else
has.

Due to tax complications, the percentage of money we're going to be able to
give is going to vary drastically depending on how many overall copies of the
app we're able to sell. We were advised by our lawyer to use the term proceeds
as opposed to profits or revenue as a small means of protection.

Additionally, I would challenge your expectation that we should give a "fair"
amount to the Wikimedia foundation. We're the only one of the many paid
Wikipedia apps that chooses to give any money back to Wikimedia (as far as I
know, at least) and we certainly don't feel as though we have any obligation
to do so. We CHOOSE to give back because we want to support Wikipedia and
free, open knowledge.

We're committed to giving back, we just don't want to back ourselves into an
unsustainable corner or make promises we can't keep.

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alexpenny
Wow good job on this one Andy.

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rcsorensen
Any thoughts for other targets? I'd love to see this for TV Tropes.

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Chocolator
My artistic/visually inclined friends will love this.

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jgamman
i prefered the physical wall with paper and string. just the way my brain
works i guess

