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xefer

I wrote this several years ago if anyone is interested:

http://xefer.com/wikipedia

It's not perfect but I enjoyed working on it

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There's a screencap of your project on that Wikipedia page!

Your project looks really cool, but it would be great if one could share a link to a query.

Thanks. I will put that together. Really I should have done that from the start.

This is alot of fun. Would it be really difficult to be able to "blacklist" pages from the UI? I keep trying to come up with really disparate topics to find interesting connections, but everything is linked by "Knowledge".

Very useful. Thank you...

Sadly, inputting 'Linguistics' >> "Science > Knowledge > Awareness > Conscious > Consciousness > Quality (philosophy) > Philosophy", rather than, for instance, >> "Philosophy of language > Meaning (philosophy of language) > Definition > Intensional definition > Logic > Philosophy".

Going by way of linguistics' own foundations routes a shorter path by one link and provides such a rich frame for understanding how we Humans found our way into philosophy.

EDIT: Ah.. below butterfinger explains, the "first link" basis.. Gah!! Unstructured text :)

Think this must be the first time I've gone out of my way to log in to post a reply.

Bloody brilliant. Care to explain how it works?

That is all. Tip of the cap to you sir.

Thanks. This is all client-side code, which was my entire goal. The visualization itself is built with the InfoVis toolkit (which I'm not sure is being maintained any longer.) If I were to do this today I'd look at D3 probably. The Wikipedia API is nice. It just requests an article by name and parses the result trying to get the first link. Getting that link can be a bit tricky though since there can be all sorts of metadata that needs to b ignored. Luckily Wikipedia seems to stick with some standard patterns. So basically it just recursively follows links until it either hit Philosophy or one that it has encountered before, in which case a branch is made.

Artistic implementation!

PS Both Kevin Bacon and bacon are 20 steps away from philosophy. Interesting.

Very cool :)

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