Mediaboss Marketing

Useful as it may be, Wikipedia is an eyesore. Like Craigslist, its design is a relic of the early web days. And because its millions of pages are global and open source, its founders would likely find it impossible to redesign the jumble of blue links and sub-headers into something more beautiful.

Owen Cornec has no such strings attached, so as a side project the French computer science student built Wikigalaxy: a Chrome experiment that turns the vast world of Wikipedia pages into a cosmic, starry nebula. When I was a kid I loved to go on Wikipedia and browse on articles. I would click on links and it would go to another page and Id do it again and again and I would end reading about people and events that I never heard about, says Cornec, whos getting his masters at ECE in Paris. I dont picture [Wikipedia] like a long sterile list of pages; its a network of ideas.

Cornec went through Wikipedias API to compile the list of Wikipedia pages that would eventually become the connected nebula. Wikipedia currently has over 4,668,000 articles; for this project, Cornec fetched a random sampling of 100,000. (He tried to source the 100,000 most viewed articles, but couldnt find that rubric.) He then dumped all that data into graph positioning software, where each page got a coordinate on a starry map according to its relationship to the other pages. In Wikigalaxy, thats determined by how many backlinks connect the disparate pages.

See the article here:
A Web App That Visualizes Wikipedia as a Starry Galaxy of ...