Race through the Wikiverse for your next internet search

By Harrison Kaminsky August 21, 2016

Wikiverse: a cosmic web of knowledge

If you’ve found yourself aimlessly clicking around on the Wikipedia machine, moving article to article only to gain more unnecessary information, there’s a new tool available to make the experience a bit more fun.

Wikiverse, a web-based interactive 3D visualization of Wikipedia, displays the encyclopedia of the internet as a web of information, “turning it into a marvelous galaxy of knowledge you can conveniently explore with your mouse,” The Next Web wrote in an article.

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Owen Cornec, a Harvard data visualization engineer, created the site, which pulls about 250,000 articles from Wikipedia and creates a massive web that connects the articles through related content and information overlap between each article.

Of course it would be unreasonable to expect all of Wikipedia’s articles to be on Wikiverse, but Cornec made sure to include top categories, super-domains, and the top 25 articles of the week.

Upon a visit to the site, users are greeted with three options, each of course having different CPU and load-time implications for your computer: “Light,” with 50,000 articles, 1 percent of Wikipedia, “Medium,” 100,000 articles, 2 percent of Wikipedia, and “Complete,” 250,000 articles, 5 percent of Wikipedia.

The “Wikiverse” is generated after selecting an option, and users are greeted with a draggable 3D web of articles, reminiscent of a space travel. Upon clicking on an entry, an excerpt of the article comes up in the left pane, while a menu on the right pane lets users view history, see the top 25 articles, go into fullscreen mode, and more.

Because the tool isn’t as expansive as Wikipedia, avid players of The Wikipedia Game will certainly have a blast clicking and dragging their way through stars to reach their desired encyclopedia entry.

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Harrison Kaminsky

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Harrison’s obsession in the tech space originated in his father’s electronics store in Denville, New Jersey, where he…

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