hi here is an extract from a short talk i had on irc lately:
kakau does anyone present remember this posting concerning a
wikipedia visual navigator? my very humble suggestion (about 2 mths ago) was then bluntly rejected for no clearcut reasons or let's put it the other way: did anyone of you once come across http://www.visualthesaurus.com/online/ or touchgraphs wikibrowser http://www.touchgraph.com/TGWB_101_SS.html ???
hashar I did I dont think we can use that on wikipedia servers, it
will generate too many queries for the DB servers kakau and exactly *this* is *not* true. all you'd need to make that work would be a wiki "action" that only listed either the hyperlinks or the categories or both of one article at a time... look at tgwikibrowser. it's fairly straigthforward. while you are in "visual" mode, the load would be even less than for a full text query result
hashar that s still one more query made additional queries to build
the tree
kakau you won't have one person do both at the same time: either
people navigate through "bubbles" or through text. this argument is nil... 8) some people, just to insist a bit more, do in fact like http://www.kartoo.com/ which is not so far from my suggestion, either i just cannot imagine that the outside world is really busy and keen on visual navigation just for laughs i'd rather think that the idea holds some "extra value"... for the "customer"
as an aside: i think i posted an idea about a "semantic wikipedia" over one year ago. the idea, sadly enough, was turned down too. now we see categorization in full bloom. whom exactly should i address to make my visual navigation proposal be heard? 8)
On Thursday 16 December 2004 17:10, Kai Kumpf wrote:
hi
here is an extract from a short talk i had on irc lately:
kakau does anyone present remember this posting concerning a
wikipedia visual navigator? my very humble suggestion (about 2 mths ago) was then bluntly rejected for no clearcut reasons or let's put it the other way: did anyone of you once come across http://www.visualthesaurus.com/online/ or touchgraphs wikibrowser http://www.touchgraph.com/TGWB_101_SS.html ???
i've played around a bit with the touchgraph-thingy. it needs some polish, but the code is quite readable and adding some code to get its data from wikipedia whould be no problem.
hashar I did I dont think we can use that on wikipedia servers, it
will generate too many queries for the DB servers kakau and exactly *this* is *not* true. all you'd need to make that work would be a wiki "action" that only listed either the hyperlinks or the categories or both of one article at a time... look at tgwikibrowser. it's fairly straigthforward. while you are in "visual" mode, the load would be even less than for a full text query result
hashar that s still one more query made additional queries to build
the tree
i think hashar is right: you can click quite a lot of such tree-nodes within a second, so it would need more queries to the database than simple browsing does, now. i don't know about the database schema, so i cannot say how expensive each of these queries would be.
kakau you won't have one person do both at the same time: either
people navigate through "bubbles" or through text. this argument is nil... 8) some people, just to insist a bit more, do in fact like http://www.kartoo.com/ which is not so far from my suggestion, either i just cannot imagine that the outside world is really busy and keen on visual navigation just for laughs i'd rather think that the idea holds some "extra value"... for the "customer"
the idea of navigating through dense graphs graphically is quite appealing, but using it in practice i realized it's less useable than one would think at first.
as an aside: i think i posted an idea about a "semantic wikipedia" over one year ago. the idea, sadly enough, was turned down too. now we see categorization in full bloom. whom exactly should i address to make my visual navigation proposal be heard? 8)
categorization as it is is a mess. the question is, would real semantic information (RDF-triples, or something like that) be better?
daniel
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org