4 ms·

Show HN: Wiki of the Day – word of the day for Wikipedia articles

5 points by tasn 12y ago

stdbrouw 12y ago
The push aspect of it is interesting, as a way to create a routine, but other than that, won't this suffer from the same problems that Wikipedia's "today's featured article" and "random article" features have? You want some serendipity, sure, but true randomness where one day you're reading about a 60s jazz album and the next about a Swedish politician and the next about some minutiae of graph theory is not necessarily what a curious person is looking for.
- walterbell 12y ago
  See http://www.random.co http://www.random.co (iOS app) for a mixture of personalization and randomness.
- tasn 12y ago
  Thanks for your comments. I agree with your comment about the true randomness (although it is nice to explore all parts of Wikipedia, and the randomize button helps in exploring), and we are actually working on adding categories. The problem is that Wikipedia doesn't offer any helpful API in doing that, which means we'll have to download and analyse (on our server) the Wikipedia db for all the languages we support, which is a bit of a PITA. Btw, a nice feature of the push aspect, is that we only show articles when unlocking the screen so they don't interfere too much.
- cmiller1 12y ago
  You could always pull stuff daily off of something like reddit's /r/wikipedia for a more curated selection of articles.
  - tasn 12y ago
    That's a really good idea, thanks!
rspeer 12y ago
I know that fighting against language change is usually a losing battle, and I know that a generation has grown up believing that "wiki" means "Wikipedia article". And I'm going to complain about it anyway, because it's overloading a useful term that doesn't have a good replacement, as far as I know. It would be nice if we could hold on to the definition of "wiki" as "editable website" for a little longer. I'd expect a "wiki of the day" to perhaps be Wiktionary one day, c2 another day, Wookiepedia on a third day... Can I suggest "Wikipedia of the Day", or if you need to be searchable as "wiki", at least "Wiki Article of the Day"?
- tasn 12y ago
  Thanks for your suggestions. In my point of view "Wiki Article of the Day" is not nearly as nice, I'm borderline about "Wikipedia of the Day" (note that in the feature graphic it's Wikipedia and not wiki), and in general I don't think anyone thinks it's anything but Wikipedia. We are thinking about adding some domain-specific wiki (e.g. a Star Wars wiki) support soon, so the name might be more applicable then. :) Btw, I think that in most cases it's obvious when people mean a general wiki and when people mean wikipedia depending on the context, so this language change is not too dramatic.

5 points by tasn 12y ago

The push aspect of it is interesting, as a way to create a routine, but other than that, won't this suffer from the same problems that Wikipedia's "today's featured article" and "random article" features have? You want some serendipity, sure, but true randomness where one day you're reading about a 60s jazz album and the next about a Swedish politician and the next about some minutiae of graph theory is not necessarily what a curious person is looking for.

walterbell 12y ago
See http://www.random.co http://www.random.co (iOS app) for a mixture of personalization and randomness.
tasn 12y ago
Thanks for your comments. I agree with your comment about the true randomness (although it is nice to explore all parts of Wikipedia, and the randomize button helps in exploring), and we are actually working on adding categories. The problem is that Wikipedia doesn't offer any helpful API in doing that, which means we'll have to download and analyse (on our server) the Wikipedia db for all the languages we support, which is a bit of a PITA. Btw, a nice feature of the push aspect, is that we only show articles when unlocking the screen so they don't interfere too much.
cmiller1 12y ago
You could always pull stuff daily off of something like reddit's /r/wikipedia for a more curated selection of articles.
- tasn 12y ago
  That's a really good idea, thanks!

rspeer 12y ago

I know that fighting against language change is usually a losing battle, and I know that a generation has grown up believing that "wiki" means "Wikipedia article". And I'm going to complain about it anyway, because it's overloading a useful term that doesn't have a good replacement, as far as I know. It would be nice if we could hold on to the definition of "wiki" as "editable website" for a little longer. I'd expect a "wiki of the day" to perhaps be Wiktionary one day, c2 another day, Wookiepedia on a third day... Can I suggest "Wikipedia of the Day", or if you need to be searchable as "wiki", at least "Wiki Article of the Day"?

tasn 12y ago
Thanks for your suggestions. In my point of view "Wiki Article of the Day" is not nearly as nice, I'm borderline about "Wikipedia of the Day" (note that in the feature graphic it's Wikipedia and not wiki), and in general I don't think anyone thinks it's anything but Wikipedia. We are thinking about adding some domain-specific wiki (e.g. a Star Wars wiki) support soon, so the name might be more applicable then. :) Btw, I think that in most cases it's obvious when people mean a general wiki and when people mean wikipedia depending on the context, so this language change is not too dramatic.