Wikiverse Transforms Wikipedia Pages Into A 3D Universe Of Information

Umer Sohail

8 years ago

There are days when you just want to browse the net aimlessly, jumping from link to link and site to site to kill time or in a bid to find some inspiration. And what better place do this than our very own Wikipedia! With a host of information (both accurate and inaccurate), Wikipedia has been a great resource for quick information gathering for decades now.It seems like Owen Cornec, a Harvard data visualisation engineer has fallen a bit too much in love with Wikipedia. In order to redefine the way we use Wikipedia , he has created a “Wikiverse”. It is a web-based interactive 3D visualisation of Wikipedia, and is designed to display the most famous and exhaustive encyclopaedia of the internet as a web of information lying in a marvellous galaxy of knowledge explorable in the most remarkable of ways.

Wikiverse doesn’t use all of Wikipedia’s articles, but it does include top categories, super-domains, and the top 25 articles of the week, etc. All these take the number of total articles to round about 250,000, thus creating a massive web that connects the articles using keywords, and related content overlapping between each article. When you first open the site, you will are presented with three options to use on the site, depending on your CPU’s speed and the load-time implications for your computer. First one is “Light,” which contains around 50,000 articles and a 1 percent of Wikipedia. Then the second one is “Medium,” with 100,000 articles and consuming 2 percent of Wikipedia. And the last one is labelled “Complete”, giving you a magnificent mesh of 250,000 articles comprising of 5 percent of Wikipedia.

Reminding of space travel, a universe of information explodes on the screen, and the users are greeted with a draggable 3D web of articles. When you click an entry, the article comes up in the left pane, while a menu suggesting related articles, history and the top 25 articles etc. pop up on the right pane.

The tool isn’t exhaustive enough to be considered useful for the moment, but as Owen himself puts it, “it is a galactic reimagination of Wikipedia”. Wikiverse, where information turns into art.

Do you like the concept behind Wikiverse? Let us know in the comments’ section below!

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