A Wikipedia Reader for iOS that visualizes the connections between articles
wikiwebapp.comForce-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.)
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.
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.
I agree. More and more people are latching on to the richness of graph-oriented thinking, but I don't think anyone has a good theory of graph-oriented UX.
Although I wouldn't be too surprised if someone found the solution at Bell Labs in the 80s and we're just waiting to rediscover it.
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.
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.
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.
The iPad is about cool apps, not useful apps... I want to try this out and see if it's enjoyable.
I think you have a point, but I have learned a lot about programming and UI in the last years just by being an iPad user. There are a lot of apps in the iOS ecosystem, some more cool than useful of course, but such concentration of great programmers and designers really inspires me to be better.
When I bought my iPad I wasn't really sure about my user scenario, but now I see that getting inspired by other people's work is a big part of it.
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.
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.
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!
Why not let the user "flick" it off the screen? That sounds more fun (and probably intuitive), anyway.
It reminds me a little of the Web Stalker, an experimental web browser from 1997: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=7
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Found this while searching for "Six degrees of Wikipedia"
You should also check out "3 Degrees of Wikipedia" http://www.threewiki.com/
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.
I just tried it beginning with the article on HN and ended up in a 9 article loop beginning with science.
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.
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.)
Why would Wikipedia want to redirect to an unofficial application?
I meant that it could technically be done but only from the Wikipedia side, not that they have any motive to do it.
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.
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...
It could be in a cookie Wikipedia looks at. You specify the name of the app you want to launch in the cookie, then the site redirects you to that app.
MediaWiki/Wikipedia has a skin feature where a user can set their own custom user-specific JS to be added to each page. (Think of it as a server-side Greasemonkey or auto-triggered-bookmarklet.) See...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:User_style#JavaScript
...and the 'Custom JavaScript' links of...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsect...
I suspect you could use this to implement a bounce-to-other-app-via-URL-handler mechanism, for any logged-in user who could be coached to cut&paste the right Javascript into the right place.
We were thinking about working on a bookmarklet to make the Safari > Wikiweb (or another Wikipedia app that has a url scheme) transition easier.
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?
We rolled our own physics to get the layout in the node view to a point that felt right.
Well done. It's fun to play with. I like the little earthquake a node does when it's about to expand.
I like it, never seen that before with wiki articles
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.
This same feature has been known as a 'LinkMap' in the Encyclopaedia Britannica app. I wonder if they took the idea from Britannica.
We had not seen that before, but it is pretty similar. Thanks for sharing!
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.
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.
Wow good job on this one Andy.
Any thoughts for other targets? I'd love to see this for TV Tropes.
My artistic/visually inclined friends will love this.
i prefered the physical wall with paper and string. just the way my brain works i guess