7 ms·

Show HN: An extension to track your Wikipedia adventures

178 points by demegire 2y ago

Wiki Journey tracks your daily Wikipedia rabbit holes in a tree format. Available on Firefox and Chrome: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wiki-journey/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wiki-journey/ https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/wiki-journey/lehenbcbjcnkhkikgopniimobmmdcfog https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/wiki-journey/lehenb... It's open source, feel free to contribute! https://github.com/demegire/wiki-journey https://github.com/demegire/wiki-journey

IncreasePosts 2y ago
I wrote a plugin just like this, and every day, I have it present me with a quiz based on a summaries of the first paragraph of the pages I read over the day. Basically, I was reading way too much Wikipedia and not actually storing much information, so I have the extension shame me if I don't remember what I read.
- timcobb 2y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40151952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40151952 ;)
- cooper_ganglia 2y ago
  That's genius. Have you published this as an extension? I'd love automatically-written flashcards to quiz myself on what I've read that day...
- nullindividual 2y ago
  We absorb the words in front of our eyes even if we're not conscious of it. A topic that you glossed over may come up in another context and remind you of that wiki article. It shapes who we are. And sometimes knowledge of the existence of a topic is valuable.
  - dr_kiszonka 2y ago
    I remember seeing an article about it in HN.
- graypegg 2y ago
  I would love to mess around with this if you've published it somewhere! Folks would love it as a Show HN I bet too!
jskherman 2y ago
Similarly, per chance, is there also an extension for the browser to show a tree graph or a directional node graph like in Obsidian for the sequence of websites you visit in your browser history to see your whole rabbit hole on the Internet? I'm pretty sure the tech is already used by the advertising industry.
serenayakgun 2y ago
wow, this is great
CalRobert 2y ago
Suddenly I am reminded, for the first time in maybe 2 decades, that "surfing the internet" was once a term used specifically for this kind of rabbit-holing
RockRobotRock 2y ago
POV: It's 4 AM and I still can't fall asleep
krylon 2y ago
I didn't know I needed this.
AdmiralAsshat 2y ago
My Wikipedia searches are like my porn searches: no one needs to know about them, least of all myself. They bring only shame and remorse.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
mistrial9 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
xcdzvyn 2y ago
This is fantastic. Great idea!
steezeburger 2y ago
This is really cool! It would be super neat if the nodes were more interconnected, forming a fully connected graph rather than just a tree.
- sixo 2y ago
  This is tracking the user's trajectory through the site, necessarily a tree, not the network structure of W itself.
  - steezeburger 2y ago
    Oo, yeah, that's a good point! I totally see why it was done this way now. Though I do still think it would be cool to have a toggleable overlay or something that shows the cyclic connections!
  - random3 2y ago
    How is the user journey through the site necessarily a tree? What prevents the user to create loops through their journey?
    - lyk2005 2y ago
      Not an absolute statement, just that it resembles a tree more closely as you branch off slicking on hyperlinks.
- phailhaus 2y ago
  That would be technically more "accurate", but it doesn't yield more useful information and ends up being harder to read.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
non- 2y ago
This is cool, I love how it shows you all the branches you've followed in actual tree diagram. The concept reminds of https://browser.horse/ https://browser.horse/ a bit, which has the concept of "trails" that track any links you visit. Great for research projects.
noashavit 2y ago
A graph of Wikipedia rabbit holes
jsunderland323 2y ago
This is great! Will try to give a try later
- kcarter80 2y ago
  Narrator: they didn't.
  - KaiMagnus 2y ago
    Have to admit I'm slightly disappointed that the FF version only shows two users still and one of them is me.
phailhaus 2y ago
Have you tried out a tangled-tree visualization? [1] I've found it to be super useful when visualizing these sorts of relationships in a compact way, and it naturally sorts the data topologically. [1] https://observablehq.com/@nitaku/tangled-tree-visualization-ii https://observablehq.com/@nitaku/tangled-tree-visualization-...
- throwaway444441 2y ago
  Very cool! One small point of pedantry: > A tree with multiple inheritance (sometimes called tangled tree) cannot be represented by using a classic tree visualization. It is technically a directed acyclic graph (DAG) with one (or more) nodes identified as root. What is the difference between a DAG and a tangled tree? Isn't any DAG a tangled tree? I don't see immediately why a new definition is required.
  - S33V 2y ago
    I'm not entirely familiar with tangled trees, but it seems like one of the larger differences is that a tangled tree isn't necessarily acrylic. For this example, someone could navigate away from one page, but potentially be linked back to it later down the adventure.
    - throwaway444441 2y ago
      > A tree with multiple inheritance (sometimes called tangled tree) By the author's definition, multiple inheritance prohibits cycles. DAGs can be modeled as tree with back edges to non-ancestors. So I'm pretty sure tangled tree = DAG. > For this example, someone could navigate away from one page, but potentially be linked back to it later down the adventure. Good point, maybe "tangled tree with back edges to ancestors" is the really correct model for what the author wants. The key point of the visualization is to highlight the deviation from a standard DAG or tree.
      - phailhaus 2y ago
        The author already says that: > It is technically a directed acyclic graph (DAG) But DAG's don't have 'roots', they just have nodes. The concept of roots makes it a tangled tree.
bawolff 2y ago
That's cool. I do find it ironic though that wikipedia is one of the major sites with the least amount of user tracking, and then users decide to implement the tracking themselves.
- nullhole 2y ago
  That is funny, though this is more tracking-by-users than tracking-of-users
  - BlueTemplar 2y ago
    reminded me of : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40191075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40191075
  - eichin 2y ago
    tracking for-the-benefit-of users, which only has to be done by the users because no services can be trusted :-)
BlairCurrey 2y ago
Cool tool. Might be cool to make something wikipedia agnostic. Sometimes I manually create such a thing via obsidian but its kind of tedious. It's interesting how sometimes different starting sources read far apart in time lead to rabbitholes which cross paths. This reminds me of a python scraper I wrote a while back when I was learning to program - Youtube rabbithole: https://github.com/BlairCurrey/youtube-rabbithole https://github.com/BlairCurrey/youtube-rabbithole It basically just follows the next recommended video, recording the path along the way. More about tracing the youtube algorithm than tracking your own journey.
HeySVspackos 2y ago
[dead]
nathell 2y ago
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/214/ https://xkcd.com/214/
nirmel 2y ago
I'll mention that I made what could be described as a AI-generated Wikipedia alternative, where you can generate articles on anything with text links on terms that link to new articles that get generated considering the context of the the article path that got you there. I reckon Wiki-enthusiasts won't be disappointed: https://anylearn.ai https://anylearn.ai
- dcsan 2y ago
  Awesome!
bloopernova 2y ago
I feel like there's a lot of knowledge or information that we're "leaving on the plate". For instance, the sites we visit, the files we edit, the branches and PRs we create, etc etc. All of that is related, but it feels like that context is being lost or discarded. An example might be: I have to include new AWS resources in a deployment, so I look up information about them, find examples and read about potential problems, security information, etc etc. That then becomes edits in a terraform file somewhere, with a Jita ticket, my own knowledge database (Emacs org-roam files in my case, Obsidian etc for other people). Then the feature branch gets a PR to dev, we might discuss changes in Teams (ugh) or a meeting. All of that seems ripe to be linked together conceptually, but the computer has no way to do that. It makes me wonder if that could be fed into the right machine learning thing to at least start tracking this sort of work stuff. Heck just synchronizing my Firefox bookmarks (ff lets you tag your bookmarks) with my org-roam instance's tags would be useful. Tagged files in my knowledge base could be automatically linked to similarly tagged bookmarks.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- steezeburger 2y ago
  I've been thinking of something like this since LLMs became popular. I've toyed around with some proof of concepts, but haven't had the time or motivation to work on it lately. I love the idea of tagging everything and showing connections when you're searching for things. Also semantic search would be great, like "blue website with information about databases I read last week" would be super powerful in my opinion. I really love the idea of digital knowledge bases, but as you said, I think we're leaving a lot on the table. I need to get back to my project of a user-owned-data knowledge base.
  - jskherman 2y ago
    What kind of approach did you take? I was thinking along the lines of requiring something like rewind.ai or some program that autoscreenshots your screen at a set interval (or originally a recorded video split into several images later) and having a vision-capable model (particularly specialized in UIs) describe these set of images in order to build a dataset of images-tags-description and the like.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ldayley 2y ago
Interesting. I’ve been using the Wikipedia iOS app (which saves history by the day) to keep track of my personal rabbit hole journeys…
starkparker 2y ago
Looking at https://github.com/demegire/wiki-journey/blob/main/firefox/content.js https://github.com/demegire/wiki-journey/blob/main/firefox/c... It seems likely that the extension could be customized to any Mediawiki instance? As an admin I'd love to be able to use it elsewhere. This looks like it could be a great tool working with test users on stuff like information architecture, to see the path of how they found information. (I know there are better tools for that, but something that focuses tightly on wiki interactions would be useful to me.)
KaiMagnus 2y ago
That’s a very cool project and I wish something like this would exist for all websites. A few years ago I did a university project where we looked into (internet) research and how information discovery and gathering could be improved. (https://www.kaimagnus.de/projects/halo https://www.kaimagnus.de/projects/halo) There we had the concept of a similar looking tree. Users could then come back to their exploration and take notes, prioritize and sort. It was only a concept back then, so it’s nice to see it in action.
russdpale 2y ago
This is one of those ideas where you think "why the hell didn't I think of this?"

178 points by demegire 2y ago

IncreasePosts 2y ago

I wrote a plugin just like this, and every day, I have it present me with a quiz based on a summaries of the first paragraph of the pages I read over the day. Basically, I was reading way too much Wikipedia and not actually storing much information, so I have the extension shame me if I don't remember what I read.

timcobb 2y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40151952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40151952 ;)
cooper_ganglia 2y ago
That's genius. Have you published this as an extension? I'd love automatically-written flashcards to quiz myself on what I've read that day...
nullindividual 2y ago
We absorb the words in front of our eyes even if we're not conscious of it. A topic that you glossed over may come up in another context and remind you of that wiki article. It shapes who we are. And sometimes knowledge of the existence of a topic is valuable.
- dr_kiszonka 2y ago
  I remember seeing an article about it in HN.
graypegg 2y ago
I would love to mess around with this if you've published it somewhere! Folks would love it as a Show HN I bet too!

jskherman 2y ago

Similarly, per chance, is there also an extension for the browser to show a tree graph or a directional node graph like in Obsidian for the sequence of websites you visit in your browser history to see your whole rabbit hole on the Internet? I'm pretty sure the tech is already used by the advertising industry.

serenayakgun 2y ago

wow, this is great

CalRobert 2y ago

Suddenly I am reminded, for the first time in maybe 2 decades, that "surfing the internet" was once a term used specifically for this kind of rabbit-holing

RockRobotRock 2y ago

POV: It's 4 AM and I still can't fall asleep

krylon 2y ago

I didn't know I needed this.

AdmiralAsshat 2y ago

My Wikipedia searches are like my porn searches: no one needs to know about them, least of all myself. They bring only shame and remorse.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

mistrial9 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

xcdzvyn 2y ago

This is fantastic. Great idea!

steezeburger 2y ago

This is really cool! It would be super neat if the nodes were more interconnected, forming a fully connected graph rather than just a tree.

sixo 2y ago
This is tracking the user's trajectory through the site, necessarily a tree, not the network structure of W itself.
- steezeburger 2y ago
  Oo, yeah, that's a good point! I totally see why it was done this way now. Though I do still think it would be cool to have a toggleable overlay or something that shows the cyclic connections!
- random3 2y ago
  How is the user journey through the site necessarily a tree? What prevents the user to create loops through their journey?
  - lyk2005 2y ago
    Not an absolute statement, just that it resembles a tree more closely as you branch off slicking on hyperlinks.
phailhaus 2y ago
That would be technically more "accurate", but it doesn't yield more useful information and ends up being harder to read.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

non- 2y ago

This is cool, I love how it shows you all the branches you've followed in actual tree diagram. The concept reminds of https://browser.horse/ https://browser.horse/ a bit, which has the concept of "trails" that track any links you visit. Great for research projects.

noashavit 2y ago

A graph of Wikipedia rabbit holes

jsunderland323 2y ago

This is great! Will try to give a try later

kcarter80 2y ago
Narrator: they didn't.
- KaiMagnus 2y ago
  Have to admit I'm slightly disappointed that the FF version only shows two users still and one of them is me.

phailhaus 2y ago

Have you tried out a tangled-tree visualization? [1] I've found it to be super useful when visualizing these sorts of relationships in a compact way, and it naturally sorts the data topologically. [1] https://observablehq.com/@nitaku/tangled-tree-visualization-ii https://observablehq.com/@nitaku/tangled-tree-visualization-...

throwaway444441 2y ago
Very cool! One small point of pedantry: > A tree with multiple inheritance (sometimes called tangled tree) cannot be represented by using a classic tree visualization. It is technically a directed acyclic graph (DAG) with one (or more) nodes identified as root. What is the difference between a DAG and a tangled tree? Isn't any DAG a tangled tree? I don't see immediately why a new definition is required.
- S33V 2y ago
  I'm not entirely familiar with tangled trees, but it seems like one of the larger differences is that a tangled tree isn't necessarily acrylic. For this example, someone could navigate away from one page, but potentially be linked back to it later down the adventure.
  - throwaway444441 2y ago
    > A tree with multiple inheritance (sometimes called tangled tree) By the author's definition, multiple inheritance prohibits cycles. DAGs can be modeled as tree with back edges to non-ancestors. So I'm pretty sure tangled tree = DAG. > For this example, someone could navigate away from one page, but potentially be linked back to it later down the adventure. Good point, maybe "tangled tree with back edges to ancestors" is the really correct model for what the author wants. The key point of the visualization is to highlight the deviation from a standard DAG or tree.
    - phailhaus 2y ago
      The author already says that: > It is technically a directed acyclic graph (DAG) But DAG's don't have 'roots', they just have nodes. The concept of roots makes it a tangled tree.

bawolff 2y ago

That's cool. I do find it ironic though that wikipedia is one of the major sites with the least amount of user tracking, and then users decide to implement the tracking themselves.

nullhole 2y ago
That is funny, though this is more tracking-by-users than tracking-of-users
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  reminded me of : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40191075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40191075
- eichin 2y ago
  tracking for-the-benefit-of users, which only has to be done by the users because no services can be trusted :-)

BlairCurrey 2y ago

Cool tool. Might be cool to make something wikipedia agnostic. Sometimes I manually create such a thing via obsidian but its kind of tedious. It's interesting how sometimes different starting sources read far apart in time lead to rabbitholes which cross paths. This reminds me of a python scraper I wrote a while back when I was learning to program - Youtube rabbithole: https://github.com/BlairCurrey/youtube-rabbithole https://github.com/BlairCurrey/youtube-rabbithole It basically just follows the next recommended video, recording the path along the way. More about tracing the youtube algorithm than tracking your own journey.

HeySVspackos 2y ago

[dead]

nathell 2y ago

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/214/ https://xkcd.com/214/

nirmel 2y ago

I'll mention that I made what could be described as a AI-generated Wikipedia alternative, where you can generate articles on anything with text links on terms that link to new articles that get generated considering the context of the the article path that got you there. I reckon Wiki-enthusiasts won't be disappointed: https://anylearn.ai https://anylearn.ai

dcsan 2y ago
Awesome!

bloopernova 2y ago

I feel like there's a lot of knowledge or information that we're "leaving on the plate". For instance, the sites we visit, the files we edit, the branches and PRs we create, etc etc. All of that is related, but it feels like that context is being lost or discarded. An example might be: I have to include new AWS resources in a deployment, so I look up information about them, find examples and read about potential problems, security information, etc etc. That then becomes edits in a terraform file somewhere, with a Jita ticket, my own knowledge database (Emacs org-roam files in my case, Obsidian etc for other people). Then the feature branch gets a PR to dev, we might discuss changes in Teams (ugh) or a meeting. All of that seems ripe to be linked together conceptually, but the computer has no way to do that. It makes me wonder if that could be fed into the right machine learning thing to at least start tracking this sort of work stuff. Heck just synchronizing my Firefox bookmarks (ff lets you tag your bookmarks) with my org-roam instance's tags would be useful. Tagged files in my knowledge base could be automatically linked to similarly tagged bookmarks.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
steezeburger 2y ago
I've been thinking of something like this since LLMs became popular. I've toyed around with some proof of concepts, but haven't had the time or motivation to work on it lately. I love the idea of tagging everything and showing connections when you're searching for things. Also semantic search would be great, like "blue website with information about databases I read last week" would be super powerful in my opinion. I really love the idea of digital knowledge bases, but as you said, I think we're leaving a lot on the table. I need to get back to my project of a user-owned-data knowledge base.
- jskherman 2y ago
  What kind of approach did you take? I was thinking along the lines of requiring something like rewind.ai or some program that autoscreenshots your screen at a set interval (or originally a recorded video split into several images later) and having a vision-capable model (particularly specialized in UIs) describe these set of images in order to build a dataset of images-tags-description and the like.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ldayley 2y ago

Interesting. I’ve been using the Wikipedia iOS app (which saves history by the day) to keep track of my personal rabbit hole journeys…

starkparker 2y ago

Looking at https://github.com/demegire/wiki-journey/blob/main/firefox/content.js https://github.com/demegire/wiki-journey/blob/main/firefox/c... It seems likely that the extension could be customized to any Mediawiki instance? As an admin I'd love to be able to use it elsewhere. This looks like it could be a great tool working with test users on stuff like information architecture, to see the path of how they found information. (I know there are better tools for that, but something that focuses tightly on wiki interactions would be useful to me.)

KaiMagnus 2y ago

That’s a very cool project and I wish something like this would exist for all websites. A few years ago I did a university project where we looked into (internet) research and how information discovery and gathering could be improved. (https://www.kaimagnus.de/projects/halo https://www.kaimagnus.de/projects/halo) There we had the concept of a similar looking tree. Users could then come back to their exploration and take notes, prioritize and sort. It was only a concept back then, so it’s nice to see it in action.

russdpale 2y ago

This is one of those ideas where you think "why the hell didn't I think of this?"