Show HN: Weekend project – StumbleUpon For Wikipedia | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Weekend project – StumbleUpon For Wikipedia

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21 pointsnegamax19 comments

There's several resources, both internal and external to Wikipedia, that could be used to jump start a collection of "interesting" rather than random pages e.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:FA-Class_articles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unusual_articles

http://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/top/?sort=top&t=all

http://www.samdowning.com/interesting-wikipedia-articles/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles

Thanks. Very helpful links. Some really great feedback for the tiny project. I be adding more functionality. Specially the "Interesting" and "Category Selection" for now. If you have some ideas about navigation. Please do share those.

Building a Chrome extension is a good learning process so congratulations for that. I love going through random Wikipedia pages. More generally though, if "in your bookmarks bar" is good enough rather than next to the address bar, one could drag this link in and rename it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

That's pretty cool. I built a backend with titles list etc. It seems in vain now. Hehe :). Any suggestions to make stumbling Wikipedia more meaningful?

Yes. Like StumbleUpon I'd rather "stumble" across pages that are actually interesting.

When you use Wikipedia's own system you get some really inane pages with statistics about minor towns or the like.. but I'd rather hit a button and get something that's either curated and known to be good OR that other users of your extension have voted up in some way.

I think your extension could provide value if people could choose a field of interest. Like if I could stumble through articles about China or about animals or even about broad things like people or places, that would be neat.

Maybe a Bayesian filter (or some analogous technique) that found "interesting" articles?

This didn't crossed my mind at all. I wonder if extension should add an upvote button to Wiki page and use that for interesting?

Ah yes, didn't see this comment before I wrote my last one. But exactly, that would certainly be interesting if you got enough users to make the results meaningful (or perhaps curated a large bunch yourself initially).

Another thing that might be handy for something like this long term is making sure I don't see the same page more than once. But that would be a lot more data for you to store.

I'd rather have it tailored to my personal taste instead of a community thing, myself.

Great idea. I will add broad categories selection.

That might be handy for people who want to study a certain subject one day. For example, if I could keep hitting a button to get random articles from a certain category, such as computer science or math.

Nothing against building Chrome extensions here either (hell, I started learning JavaScript with userscripts myself), but Wikipedia has indeed had a "Random article" feature for the longest time, and it's right there in the main navigation too: http://puu.sh/1BQ3O

Not to be too critical, but wouldn't the helpful StumbleUpon component here, (especially to differentiate it from the random Wikipedia page bookmark) be the ability for the extension to show random articles based on your personal preferences?

Hey. Thanks for the feedback. I think ability to select interests be a great addition. Working towards that.

I don't think its so much about adding interests as it is offering random but related articles to what someone views. Not everyone always checks the related articles section- and that section is not always very comprehensive. It'd be a good start to use that section though, and compensate by eliminating pages you've already visited.

I really like your idea, although the implementation still needs the actual recommendation engine. Wikipedia could really benefit from more related articles being listed/organized.

Is this more than just (OSX-only)

  open 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random'

? I haven't installed it yet, but the above should get you a random Wikipedia page.

I would like to see it for Quora.

Already exists: http://www.quora.com/shuffle

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