[HN Gopher] Show HN: An extension to track your Wikipedia advent...
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Show HN: An extension to track your Wikipedia adventures
Wiki Journey tracks your daily Wikipedia rabbit holes in a tree
format. Available on Firefox and Chrome:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wiki-journey/
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/wiki-journey/lehenb...
It's open source, feel free to contribute!
https://github.com/demegire/wiki-journey
Author : demegire
Score : 136 points
Date : 2024-05-02 14:36 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (chromewebstore.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (chromewebstore.google.com)
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| My Wikipedia searches are like my porn searches: no one needs to
| know about them, least of all myself. They bring only shame and
| remorse.
| xcdzvyn wrote:
| This is fantastic. Great idea!
| steezeburger wrote:
| This is really cool! It would be super neat if the nodes were
| more interconnected, forming a fully connected graph rather than
| just a tree.
| sixo wrote:
| This is tracking the user's trajectory through the site,
| necessarily a tree, not the network structure of W itself.
| steezeburger wrote:
| Oo, yeah, that's a good point! I totally see why it was done
| this way now.
|
| Though I do still think it would be cool to have a toggleable
| overlay or something that shows the cyclic connections!
| random3 wrote:
| How is the user journey through the site necessarily a tree?
| What prevents the user to create loops through their journey?
| lyk2005 wrote:
| Not an absolute statement, just that it resembles a tree
| more closely as you branch off slicking on hyperlinks.
| phailhaus wrote:
| That would be technically more "accurate", but it doesn't yield
| more useful information and ends up being harder to read.
| noashavit wrote:
| A graph of Wikipedia rabbit holes
| non- wrote:
| This is cool, I love how it shows you all the branches you've
| followed in actual tree diagram.
|
| The concept reminds of https://browser.horse/ a bit, which has
| the concept of "trails" that track any links you visit. Great for
| research projects.
| jsunderland323 wrote:
| This is great! Will try to give a try later
| kcarter80 wrote:
| Narrator: they didn't.
| KaiMagnus wrote:
| Have to admit I'm slightly disappointed that the FF version
| only shows two users still and one of them is me.
| phailhaus wrote:
| Have you tried out a tangled-tree visualization? [1] I've found
| it to be super useful when visualizing these sorts of
| relationships in a compact way, and it naturally sorts the data
| topologically.
|
| [1] https://observablehq.com/@nitaku/tangled-tree-
| visualization-...
| jack_riminton wrote:
| This looks really neat
| throwaway444441 wrote:
| Very cool! One small point of pedantry:
|
| > _A tree with multiple inheritance (sometimes called tangled
| tree) cannot be represented by using a classic tree
| visualization. It is technically a directed acyclic graph (DAG)
| with one (or more) nodes identified as root._
|
| What is the difference between a DAG and a tangled tree? Isn't
| any DAG a tangled tree? I don't see immediately why a new
| definition is required.
| S33V wrote:
| I'm not entirely familiar with tangled trees, but it seems
| like one of the larger differences is that a tangled tree
| isn't necessarily acrylic. For this example, someone could
| navigate away from one page, but potentially be linked back
| to it later down the adventure.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Is there a source code for the visualization?
| bawolff wrote:
| That's cool.
|
| I do find it ironic though that wikipedia is one of the major
| sites with the least amount of user tracking, and then users
| decide to implement the tracking themselves.
| nullhole wrote:
| That is funny, though this is more tracking-by-users than
| tracking-of-users
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| reminded me of :
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40191075
| eichin wrote:
| tracking _for-the-benefit-of_ users, which only has to be
| done by the users because no services can be trusted :-)
| BlairCurrey wrote:
| Cool tool. Might be cool to make something wikipedia agnostic.
| Sometimes I manually create such a thing via obsidian but its
| kind of tedious. It's interesting how sometimes different
| starting sources read far apart in time lead to rabbitholes which
| cross paths.
|
| This reminds me of a python scraper I wrote a while back when I
| was learning to program - Youtube rabbithole:
| https://github.com/BlairCurrey/youtube-rabbithole
|
| It basically just follows the next recommended video, recording
| the path along the way. More about tracing the youtube algorithm
| than tracking your own journey.
| nathell wrote:
| Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/214/
| nirmel wrote:
| I'll mention that I made what could be described as a AI-
| generated Wikipedia alternative, where you can generate articles
| on anything with text links on terms that link to new articles
| that get generated considering the context of the the article
| path that got you there. I reckon Wiki-enthusiasts won't be
| disappointed: https://anylearn.ai
| dcsan wrote:
| Awesome!
| bloopernova wrote:
| I feel like there's a lot of knowledge or information that we're
| "leaving on the plate". For instance, the sites we visit, the
| files we edit, the branches and PRs we create, etc etc. All of
| that is related, but it feels like that context is being lost or
| discarded.
|
| An example might be: I have to include new AWS resources in a
| deployment, so I look up information about them, find examples
| and read about potential problems, security information, etc etc.
| That then becomes edits in a terraform file somewhere, with a
| Jita ticket, my own knowledge database (Emacs org-roam files in
| my case, Obsidian etc for other people). Then the feature branch
| gets a PR to dev, we might discuss changes in Teams (ugh) or a
| meeting. All of that seems ripe to be linked together
| conceptually, but the computer has no way to do that.
|
| It makes me wonder if that could be fed into the right machine
| learning thing to at least start tracking this sort of work
| stuff. Heck just synchronizing my Firefox bookmarks (ff lets you
| tag your bookmarks) with my org-roam instance's tags would be
| useful. Tagged files in my knowledge base could be automatically
| linked to similarly tagged bookmarks.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I've had similar thoughts but over time you'd just end up with
| a private copy of the internet. You'll still have to search for
| the information anyway, so I'm not sure what the benefit is.
| Searching your knowledge base for "the thing I did yesterday"
| vs "how to sync Azure to AD" seems basically equivalent to me.
| You're just creating yet another thing to search.
| bloopernova wrote:
| That's a good point, you'd absolutely want to get away from
| adding another burden to the human.
|
| Seeing relevant bookmarks when I'm viewing a specific note in
| my database could be useful though. And finding pull requests
| related to a subject might also be useful.
|
| So the idea would be to reduce the number of searches
| performed by the human. Automate and enhance rather than dump
| and forget.
| eichin wrote:
| Yeah, but your private copy would be more like "The internet:
| The Good Parts" (assuming you had a way to not store what you
| immediately dismissed as garbage; maybe only include pages
| with a dwell time of 15-30s or more.) That's enormously
| valuable (and why I've implemented it before - but in
| conkeror, which didn't survive the death of xulrunner - so
| now I use pinboard and text files and logseq, which are
| pretty good but a lot more work.)
| _boffin_ wrote:
| Working on something like that, but there's still a good amount
| of work to do
| surfingdino wrote:
| I like these pieces of my digital footprint to not be
| connected. There is no need to track everything.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| Do you not want them connected, or do you not want the
| connections _shared_ and potentially used against you?
| surfingdino wrote:
| I like them not to be collected or connected. I don't trust
| those collecting such data.
| happypumpkin wrote:
| To whatever extent something like this can be done locally, I'd
| probably pay a monthly sub for it if its good enough. But I
| wouldn't want any of that leaving my machine, we get tracked
| and profiled enough as-is imo.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Yeah, this is worth at least as much as Kagi or Copilot is to
| me right now.
| steezeburger wrote:
| I've been thinking of something like this since LLMs became
| popular. I've toyed around with some proof of concepts, but
| haven't had the time or motivation to work on it lately. I love
| the idea of tagging everything and showing connections when
| you're searching for things. Also semantic search would be
| great, like "blue website with information about databases I
| read last week" would be super powerful in my opinion.
|
| I really love the idea of digital knowledge bases, but as you
| said, I think we're leaving a lot on the table. I need to get
| back to my project of a user-owned-data knowledge base.
| jskherman wrote:
| What kind of approach did you take? I was thinking along the
| lines of requiring something like rewind.ai or some program
| that autoscreenshots your screen at a set interval (or
| originally a recorded video split into several images later)
| and having a vision-capable model (particularly specialized
| in UIs) describe these set of images in order to build a
| dataset of images-tags-description and the like.
| jskherman wrote:
| There's also libraries like trafilatura in Python featured
| here in HN some time ago that could extract content from
| websites to help augment the data.
| ranger207 wrote:
| I typically write up all of that in my documentation somewhere.
| Stuff like "first thoughts are this approach might work, talked
| to person who had this idea, looked at this link and found this
| info, decided to go with this approach because of factors x, y,
| z". This isn't the primary user-facing documentation but a
| subpage or something that's helpful a couple of years down the
| line
|
| It's like a book titled "A History of [Object]" that traces
| what solved problems before the object, issues with old
| solutions, the emotional, financial, etc state of the inventor,
| why they chose this solution over that one, how the object was
| adopted and improved afterwards, other inventions spawned off
| the object, etc. Capturing the history of the object requires
| capturing the context around the object too
| joshuahutt wrote:
| My thoughts on this are to slow down and document and explore
| that knowledge and information. If it is really valuable, the
| "loss" in efficiency from slowing down will be offset by the
| gain in skill/utility from really grokking the stuff.
|
| If it's not...then there's really nothing "left" on the table
| -- if ever turns out to be valuable, you'll probably come
| across it again, when needed.
|
| I constantly get a similar feeling. I'm speeding around from
| task to task, just grasping enough to get the current task done
| so I can get to the next one and the next one...
|
| And somehow this is value-creating? Apparently it is, but it
| seems almost accidental, at that rate.
|
| I'd rather slow down and appreciate the value as it moves
| through me, into whatever I'm doing.
|
| I usually get more from the process, at the same time.
| joshuahutt wrote:
| It's like...if "less is more," then "more is less."
|
| Reminds me of a floating point number. The bigger or smaller
| they get, the less accurate they become.
|
| If you're chunking on a ton of data and tasks, you're getting
| less out of it. At a certain point, none of it even seems to
| enter your brain at all.
| sslayer wrote:
| Basically, this is what college should be teaching you -
| how to research. What good does are useless facts? I don't
| want to walk around cluttered with a dictionary - I want to
| know where to look in that dictionary. Obviously in the
| sciences there are facts that you should know, but even
| with math, its more about how to derive the formula, than
| actually memorizing it. I mean, their called "Research
| Papers" right?
| ldayley wrote:
| Interesting. I've been using the Wikipedia iOS app (which saves
| history by the day) to keep track of my personal rabbit hole
| journeys...
| starkparker wrote:
| Looking at https://github.com/demegire/wiki-
| journey/blob/main/firefox/c...
|
| It seems likely that the extension could be customized to any
| Mediawiki instance? As an admin I'd love to be able to use it
| elsewhere. This looks like it could be a great tool working with
| test users on stuff like information architecture, to see the
| path of how they found information. (I know there are better
| tools for that, but something that focuses tightly on wiki
| interactions would be useful to me.)
| russdpale wrote:
| This is one of those ideas where you think "why the hell didn't I
| think of this?"
| KaiMagnus wrote:
| That's a very cool project and I wish something like this would
| exist for all websites.
|
| A few years ago I did a university project where we looked into
| (internet) research and how information discovery and gathering
| could be improved. (https://www.kaimagnus.de/projects/halo)
|
| There we had the concept of a similar looking tree. Users could
| then come back to their exploration and take notes, prioritize
| and sort.
|
| It was only a concept back then, so it's nice to see it in
| action.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| I wrote a plugin just like this, and every day, I have it present
| me with a quiz based on a summaries of the first paragraph of the
| pages I read over the day.
|
| Basically, I was reading way too much Wikipedia and not actually
| storing much information, so I have the extension shame me if I
| don't remember what I read.
| timcobb wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40151952 ;)
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| That's genius. Have you published this as an extension? I'd
| love automatically-written flashcards to quiz myself on what
| I've read that day...
| jskherman wrote:
| Similarly, per chance, is there also an extension for the browser
| to show a tree graph or a directional node graph like in Obsidian
| for the sequence of websites you visit in your browser history to
| see your whole rabbit hole on the Internet? I'm pretty sure the
| tech is already used by the advertising industry.
| serenayakgun wrote:
| wow, this is great
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(page generated 2024-05-02 23:00 UTC)