hi everybody has anyone of you heard of or played around with touchgraphs wikibrowser (http://www.touchgraph.com/TGWB_101_SS.html)? this is a great step forward to intuitive wiki navigation! i really wonder why this hasn't come up onto the agenda long ago. all it takes for the current version of tgwikibrowser is a plaintext list of immediate links from one page (or all the pages in sorted order). this is accomplished by most wiki implementations by giving the url http://wikiurl/mainpage?action=links&mimetype=text/plain or something similar. to start with, mediawiki doesn't seem to know such a feature. why?? if we had that kind of "specialpage" and if we could adapt tgwikibrowser so that it could only read out all the links for one page at a time and retrieve the links of clicked pages on demand, this would produce no more load than simple navigation through the textual interface. what's more, one could even think of a semantic navigation, employing the categories as "big bubbles" in the wikilink graph and their corresponding articles as "small bubbles" - effectively giving the user a kind of is-a ontology navigation tool with categories acting as classes and articles as a kind of class instance similar to visulization solutions in common ontology editors like protege. think of a wikipedia that you can navigate in the same way as offered by such beautiful tools like http://www.visualthesaurus.com/ etc. anyone in favor of such a development? i could definitely contribute some concrete ideas... best kai, better know as user:kku
On Oct 27, 2004, at 4:37 AM, Kai Kumpf wrote:
all it takes for the current version of tgwikibrowser is a plaintext list of immediate links from one page (or all the pages in sorted order). this is accomplished by most wiki implementations by giving the url http://wikiurl/mainpage?action=links&mimetype=text/plain or something similar. to start with, mediawiki doesn't seem to know such a feature. why??
This would be large and fairly slow to produce on a wiki with hundreds of thousands of pages and several million links.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On Oct 27, 2004, at 4:43 AM, Brion Vibber wrote:
This would be large and fairly slow to produce on a wiki with hundreds of thousands of pages and several million links.
I should also point out that this can be generated offline from a database dump. The server with the downloads is offline for maintenance at the moment but normally resides at http://download.wikimedia.org.
I believe the dumps include a copy of the links and brokenlinks tables (if there's not a direct link, they can be pulled out of the subdirectories easily enough). From these you can get a complete list of all links within the wiki.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On Wed, 27 Oct 2004, Kai Kumpf wrote:
hi everybody has anyone of you heard of or played around with touchgraphs wikibrowser (http://www.touchgraph.com/TGWB_101_SS.html)? this is a great step forward to intuitive wiki navigation! i really wonder why this hasn't come up onto the agenda long ago. all it takes for the current version of tgwikibrowser is a plaintext list of immediate links from one page (or all the pages in sorted order). this is accomplished by most wiki implementations by giving the url http://wikiurl/mainpage?action=links&mimetype=text/plain or something similar. to start with, mediawiki doesn't seem to know such a feature. why?? if
That would be 380,000 http requests to generate the English navigation tree, and more than a million for a complet set. I think it would be easier to parse a database dump (download.wikimedia.org) and feed the data to touchgraphs in some way.
Does touchgraphs scale to 100,000s of pages? Maybe selecting some subset would be better (say, a major category and all the articles in that category and subcategories).
Alfio
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