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July 6, 2007

Visual Overview of a Wikipedia Article

WikiMindMap lets you visualize an Wikipedia article as a series of links to other articles. All the text is compressed to a list of keywords. For example, this Wikipedia page for Gmail...


...becomes this mind map...


According to Wikipedia, a mind map is "a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, and decision making."

This tool is a good way to visualize a complex Wikipedia article, become familiar with the most important concepts and explore related topics.

7 comments:

  1. Wow!! This could really be a Google search killer. What you get is automatic relevant topicalization for what you search about. Include this in Google search now!!!

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  2. Is there any tool to visualize a Wikipedia page's edit history as a movie? I wanted to code this myself but Wikipedia had a frame breaker at the time (I think they might have removed this by now)... all you'd need to do is screenscrape the full history page and connect some JavaScript to a Frameset!

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  3. This Greasemonkey script says it "allows you to view a series of modifications to a Wikipedia article as a video-like sequence". But it doesn't work for me.

    Another script that doesn't work (with screenshots this time).

    But I found an interesting discussion about this idea:

    * Jon Udell: Heavy metal umlaut: the movie (a screencast that shows the changes of a Wikipedia page)

    * Waxy.org: Daily Log: Automating Wikipedia History (the two scripts were part of a competition at waxy.org)

    Maybe there are compatibility problems with Firefox (the scripts were created in 2005).

    ReplyDelete
  4. They are moving in the predictable direction of presenting information in hypertext more and more. Note that even HTML, which many identify with hypertext, is very flat.
    MindMap is not the only way to hypertextualize reference works. Here's another example www.googleweb20.com. BTW, it has no affiliation to Google.

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  5. It's really cool but... how do I use it with my mind maps? There isn't much information at the site.

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  6. This is really wonderful. Decision making is at its peek and guys can substitute this for googling.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Wow!! This could really be a Google search killer It's really cool but... how do I use it with my mind maps? There isn't much information at the site.

    ReplyDelete

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