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Explore Wikipedia Like a Windows XP Desktop
- DeathArrow 5mo agoWell, it should also have Solitaire and Minesweeper. :)
- Eonexus 5mo agoThis is just beautiful. I wonder if this could turn into different styles, like that of a book, or a cabinet?
- koolala 5mo agotrying to find what folder has Дэбі робіць Даляс
- bawolff 5mo agoPresumably none, since its only searching english wikipedia, and that looks to be belarusian.
- koolala 5mo agoI don't think most things are ever limited to one language like that. Also, Hacker News doesn't let you delete your own comments?
- bawolff 5mo agoidk, it appears this thing is, since after clicking around a few times it becomes very obvious all the content is english. Guess that is just how the author of this project decided to make it. Generally you can delete your comment if its relatively soon after you posted it and nobody replied.
- unrvl22 5mo agolove how it loads instantly and feels smooth. imo useless but still cool
- dolmen 5mo agoYes. It definitely lacks the hourglass mouse cursor experience!
- senfiaj 5mo agoI guess XP (x64) could run like this on modern PCs.
- kristianp 5mo ago> love how it loads instantly and feels smooth. Unlike Wikipedia these days.
- hexagonwin 5mo agowikipedia is fine, and you can still use vector or even monobook skins. try adding ?useskin=monobook at the end of the url
- dewey 5mo agoIs this sarcasm? Doesn't Wikipedia look identical to 10 years ago and still load instantly?
- kristianp 5mo agoIt doesn't load very fast at all for me. Maybe they don't use a cdn close to my region, but each page load for me feels very sluggish.
- dewey 5mo agoThe shininess looks a bit more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_Media_Center_Edition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_Media_Center_Editio... and not like the regular Windows XP, but still a fun project!
- chuckadams 5mo agoDefinitely not MCE: the title bars are bright blue with the "Fisher-Price" orange buttons, which was the hallmark of regular XP.
- AMerrit 5mo agoYeah it's def going for an XP clone feel. Although it's not 1:1, I assume to skirt copyright.
- angilr 5mo agoIt is nice. I randomly click on something interest just appear in my mind and lead to this: life -> death -> last_words -> More milk. But I can't find it on Wiki. I search More milk. and the first result is this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Michael_Jackson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Michael_Jackson. Hmm, why is the name different?
- flexagoon 5mo ago"More milk" is a redirect to that page https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=More_milk.&redirect=no https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=More_milk.&redire... The "Windows XP" website displays the same article when you click on "More milk" there
- angilr 5mo agoWow, do you know what is the relationship between More milk and the death of MJ?
- Kwpolska 5mo agoThe Wikipedia article does: > After several hours and several drug injections, Jackson was still unable to fall asleep, and, according to Murray, was repeatedly asking him for "milk", a nickname for the powerful surgical general anesthetic propofol, which Jackson had used in the past as a sleep aid. At 10:40 a.m., with Jackson still not asleep, Murray relented to his requests and injected him with 25 milligrams of propofol diluted with lidocaine. With Jackson finally asleep, Murray testified that he left his bedside to go to the bathroom, and after returning two minutes later, discovered that Jackson was not breathing and had a weak pulse.
- angilr 5mo agoThanks! TIL that Propofol has a nickname "Milk of amnesia". MJ asked more milk which meant more propofol.
- jdw64 5mo agoSeeing the Windows XP theme I loved the most really brings back a wave of nostalgia
- redox99 5mo agoIs there a reason why it looks like Temu's Windows XP? Copyright concerns I guess?
- sunaookami 5mo agoBecause it's obviously vibe coded (look at the source code).
- Gualdrapo 5mo agoNot sure why they downvoted you because you have a point - icons are not the same as Windows XP's, wallpaper flat color reminds me more of Win 95/98 and the taskbar design has some details that do not match precisely with Windows XP's. I'd also bet it's due to copyright concerns
- freshollie 5mo agoProbably cos it's vibe coded? The main CSS comes from XP.css [0], but the AI additions [1] have definitely messed it up in some way. The whole thing is pure JS which is nice but the comments give a good impression isn't not hand written IMO [2] [0]: https://github.com/botoxparty/XP.css/ https://github.com/botoxparty/XP.css/ [1]: https://explorer.samismith.com/css/base.css https://explorer.samismith.com/css/base.css [2]: https://explorer.samismith.com/js/explorer.js https://explorer.samismith.com/js/explorer.js
- weezing 5mo agoAsk LLM to make a 98/XP styled website and you will discover the reason.
- macwhisperer 5mo agopretty cool! needs the search function to work tho to be useful
- neutralx 5mo agoIt kinda stays true to the Windows File Explorer as its search was always mostly useless
- sagacity 5mo agoThis is genuinely a really fun way to browse Wikipedia. Only drawback is that folder names that contain ellipsis don't show the full name when clicked.
- hellosami 5mo agoIf you click on the tile icon at the top of the window, you can have it display as a list!
- crabmusket 5mo agoWhere does the hierarchical classification come from?
- boshomi 5mo agoWikipedia category namespace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles
- underlipton 5mo agoSorta? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:The_arts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:The_arts
- pixlmint 5mo agoSuch a cool project! Now it's just missing search and a request for donations
- emil-lp 5mo agoIt's also missing the defrag tool. Without it, it's going to be very slow as the disk fills up. Should put a shortcut to it on the desktop as well, so that users who experience significant lag can defrag at will.
- kramit1288 5mo agoThis looks really cool. feels nostalgic. it would be more fun if it can be switched into whatever desktop mode i want like unix.
- prokajevo 5mo ago[dead]
- steveharing1 5mo agoWhat a beautiful nostalgic feeling. Keep up the good work! Worth adding some start menu options as well.
- hnlmorg 5mo agoI guess appearance is subjective because I always considered XP to be the ugliest Windows ever released.
- arnon 5mo agomake it look like encarta 95 and you'll have a REAL winner on your hands
- hliyan 5mo agoIncredibly beautiful, possibly because it maps so well to the mental model we typically use to organize knowledge in our heads. I don't know how we lost the folder/container vs. document/content iconography, and other things (like layout of items, sorting) during the shift to web applications.
- sznio 5mo agoI guess this model doesn't maximize engagement
- cheschire 5mo agoKnowledge doesn’t neatly align to a nested hierarchy. Especially written knowledge. Language is an imperfect means to convey knowledge, and people store that knowledge in subjective and highly personal ways. You may mentally recall balloons within “entertainment” or “party”, whereas I might store that knowledge under “horror”. Add onto that the massive focus on using graph theory to scale social networking technologically, and you effectively lose any motivation for rigid hierarchy.
- darkwater 5mo agoA folder system doesn't have to be strictly rigid, you can still have "symlinks" so the same article appearing in different folders (aka labels if you can easily duplicate content inside folders, but you retain the nested, drill-down approach)
- fleabitdev 5mo agoWikimedia Commons has this feature. Editors can manually bless certain combinations of traits as "subcategories". For example, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Paintings_of_castles https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Paintings_of_cas... contains the subcategories "Paintings of castles by country" (nested hierarchy), "Frescos of castles" (a medium), "Paintings of Château de Chillon" (a subject), and "Young Knight in a Landscape by Carpaccio" (multiple views onto a specific item). Each item may appear in multiple subcategories. As far as I can tell, the UI won't let you search for frescos of Italian castles (unless somebody's made a subcategory for that), or view all paintings of castles regardless of their subcategory. I'm not very fond of this approach. I'd prefer for each item to have an unstructured set of tags ("fresco", "depiction of a castle", "depiction of Italy"), with automatic derivation of parent tags ("fresco" implies "painting") and the option to search by multiple tags. It should be possible to automatically discover tags which best refine a search, so that the UI can still suggest them to the user, as it does today.
- hacker_mar 5mo ago[dead]
- tigerlily 5mo agoOh wow, to me the history section feels like Civilopedia (in a good way). I can't explain why.
- dunderd 5mo agoVery cool!
- Uptrenda 5mo agoSomehow the format makes me feel like its easier to learn here than the intimidating encyclopedia theme of wikipedia. It's interesting to consider the effect that presentation of information might have on learning. We know that physical books are said to be better for learning (I have heard people go up by an entire grade if they use them), but maybe there is something to be said for themes, too.
- cube00 5mo agoThis is really impressive. It's exactly what I imagined the original Microsoft Network in Windows 95 would have been like. And so The Microsoft Network wasn't a program you loaded like CompuServe. It was part of the OS, with folder icons that looked just like real folders. It was a kind of version of the Web where you could browse online data the same way you browsed your file system. This is what made it cool. It was as if the data was suddenly free of the shackles of being displayed in a program. Data wasn't just a web page, or a program showing its own internal databases. The Microsoft Network made it look like the data was right there, and you could click it and drag it around! For a brief time, back in 1995, it felt like we were on the verge of the true object-oriented web, a world filled with open data and free from the tyranny of the walled gardens.[1] It also reminded me what an excellent job Wikipedia does with their hierarchical classification which you don't see when you're often only searching by article name. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260129143542/https://www.codersnotes.com/notes/the-microsoft-network/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260129143542/https://www.coder...
- dwedge 5mo agoThat really sounds like the idea behind Plan9. Interesting.
- TuringTest 5mo ago> They had this project called Cairo that was supposed to throw out that scruffy old file-based filesystem and bring in a shiny new Object Based File System instead. It never happened, so we'll never know exactly how it might have turned out. Nowadays we call those APIs. They are REST based rather than file-based to make them distributed, the main difference is that you don't get a common user interface that all providers adjust to; you need to choose your own client to read them and write into them. And because they're created by programmers for programmers, they're not what you'd call user-friendly. Usually the only efficient way to use them is programmatically, so that you need to create a specific user interface for each API. Somehow, I doubt that Cairo would have come to be anything much different from that in the end.
- zozbot234 5mo ago> This is really impressive. It's exactly what I imagined the original Microsoft Network in Windows 95 would have been like. That's actually not far off. It was an old-fashioned BBS like Compuserve in a Windows Explorer-like window. The topic-specific icons you see in this mockup are actually very on-point, though on the Microsoft Network they would be for general BBS sections not encyclopedic articles or media.
- eur0pa 5mo agoBeautiful memories of browsing random topics in Microsoft Encarta '97
- soupspaces 5mo agoIs there a way to go up/back a folder without clicks? Enter key goes into folders.
- rigonkulous 5mo agoI'd like to see a gource interface to Wikipedia, personally ..
- moffkalast 5mo agoOk this is a genuinely perfect way to research an entire field by article instead of having to jump recursively link to link and forgetting what you were doing 5 minutes ago. I've never seen wikipedia from this categorized vantage point. If we're being real their UX is kinda crap outside the usual search->article->link flow and could use a complete rework.
- Kim_Bruning 5mo agoLucky 10000? Three tricks if you didn't already know: 1: you'll find categories at the bottom of regular mediawiki pages 2: if you click one, you'll end up on a page like eg. this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computers 3: the tree style tabs plugin in combination with middle-click is criminally underrated for navigating hierarchical data. (middleclick open-in-new-tab is only mildly handy, tree style tabs seems tepid by itself without it)
- moffkalast 5mo agoTIL, I think I've landed on these pages a decent number of times but never from wikipedia's internal nav. I assumed they were more of an adhoc occasional thing, not a standard for sorting all pages.
- Kim_Bruning 5mo agoOh, right, and I forgot about the tree views! The little arrows next to the subcategories can be clicked to open up trees, so you have hierarchical data in there as well. Try click open eg Classes of Computers (With 41 direct subcategories, and 91 pages directly in the top level category, that's a big tree!) Categories are criminally under-used.
- woodydesign 5mo agoThis is so Cool! Great concepts and execution. I could imagine this way of interaction and exploration apply to Educational area
- lavela 5mo agoI feel like the 100 or so uncategorized articles should lie either directly in home or clutter the desktop for a more authentic experience.
- ernstgnzlz 5mo agoAmazing work!
- fstepho 5mo agoI love it! Congrats !
- peppevignanello 5mo agoThis is actually so cool
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jimmydddd 5mo agoThanks! This is great.
- guilhermesfc 5mo agoSuper nice. Congrats
- jwr 5mo agoLarge scrollbars! Windows with borders! What a relief! This has become a forgotten art: we focus so much on CONTENT these days that we forget that people want to use the mouse to scroll, and use the mouse to resize windows.
- lukan 5mo agoHm. It is a clear UI, but I would prefer more space for the content.
- __natty__ 5mo agoI agree. We focus on content where usually it’s so poorly structured and displayed it lacks final touches. I prefer wider scrolling bar than extra white space in the browser. Same goes for finder. I find old systems to be much more usable for me than modern ones
- MK2k 5mo agothis needs to be an offline bootable usb version :)
- brynnbee 5mo agoI did something similar for my personal site :) https://brynnbateman.com/ https://brynnbateman.com/
- blks 5mo agoIt’s too snappy for a windows xp experience.
- piyiotisk 5mo agowhat tech stack does it uses?
- ZoomZoomZoom 5mo agoThis is cute, but the UI is uncannily not there (I think there were multiple attempts of designing the XP for web already which looked more authentic). But my biggest gripe is, why represent it as a file system with WordPad displaying HTML? I get the idea for media, but not for the articles. It's pretty obvious that Wikipedia should be a single CHM file. That would be nice and much more immersive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help
- klaussilveira 5mo agoCHM files were great, it actually made documenting enjoyable. I miss those days.
- underlipton 5mo agoThere seems to be some editorializing in category choice, which makes this a bit of a no-go for me. I'll just use the real thing.
- jovial_cavalier 5mo agoI really want a linux virtual filesystem that does this.
- sjreese 5mo agoImpressive, I will use it
- jan_Sate 5mo agoThat's pretty fun to play with. Whoever made it, good job! :D
- a1o 5mo agoCan I run this offline?
- bovermyer 5mo agoThis is fantastic. And I really appreciate that it doesn't pollute my history API with a bunch of exploration marks.
- gargola_ 5mo agoIt doesn't work for me. Nothing clickable opens anything or do anything for that matter. Am I the only one experiencing this?
- dustinroepsch 5mo agoThis is what Rocky brought home to the Eridians
- nickburns 5mo agoOkay, okay... *enables JavaScript for explorer.samismith.com*
- OkGoDoIt 5mo agoI’m surprised the search function in the start menu doesn’t do anything. Seems like that would be super useful. But I did enjoy this, nice job with the polish.
- basilgohar 5mo agoWindows XP's desktop rendered as a web page is snappier.
- ShinyLeftPad 5mo agoHonestly, a testament to current Wikipedia design, because while it's fun to click around it's literally impossible to find what you need in this kind of GUI. (Geofile explorer is simply baffling.)
- Yajirobe 5mo agoWhat does Wikipedia do differently? I don't think I have ever used Wikipedia's internal navigation - if I want to find something I usually type 'XYZ wikipedia' into Google and click the first link.
- ShinyLeftPad 5mo agoI often use category links on the bottom or in the sidebar when researching. Also I use search, which doesn't work in this alternative GUI. Sometimes I check the article in another language.
- x0152 5mo ago[dead]
- kanswam 5mo agoWikipedia has come a long way since they started where anyone can go in and update the pages without having it verified...
- maxglute 5mo agoNeato. I will never understand how microsoft settled on that vomit teal.
- sharts 5mo agoThis is kinda not dissimilar to old school 90’s yahoo.com.
- person3 5mo agoHaving used Windows XP this bothers me because it's just slightly off.
- solarized 5mo agobeautiful. please change doublr click to single click when open the folder.