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Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

wikiloopr.com

11–20 of 171 posts

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#11
When images appear first in the page's source, the wrong link is chosen. I assume you are trying to go for the first link, as a human reader would see it.

For example, the page on Anime:

http://wikiloopr.com/Anime

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anime&action=e...

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#12

When images appear first in the page's source, the wrong link is chosen. I assume you are trying to go for the first link, as a human reader would see it. For example, the page on Anime: http://wikiloopr.com/Anime http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anime&action=e...

thanks! gonna fix that later

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#13
This reminds me of a game I used to play as an intern with other interns to kill time. Someone would pick a Wikipedia article deep down in the bowels of Wikipedia and we would race to the article from Wikipedia only using links. We could get the article surprisingly fast, most within only 5 intermediate page visits from the homepage.

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#14

Wikipedia is aware of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy

As they describe in the page, when you describe something, you are trying to place it within a general framework.

In trying to describe a domain in an encyclopedia, it does little good to use language specific to the domain. If your reader doesn't know what Biology is, it's little use trying to describe it in terms of Microbiology and Immunology. You have to use more general language.

There are are few words more general and meaningless in our language than "organization".

edit - grammar

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#15
I can't replicate it, but I encountered a weird bug. I entered "Star Trek" and hit Enter. The suggested items list appeared and I clicked on "Star Trek". Page titles appeared as normal, but everything appeared twice, like so:

  Star Trek
  Star Trek
  Cinema of the United States
  Film
  Cinema of the United States
  Recording
  Data
  Level of measurement
  Film
  ...etc until the last page title, "Reality"
Seems like two processes were running in parallel and outputting to the same stream.

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#19
This is beautiful. I've always thought sites like IMDB and Wikipedia are hypertext expressions of the purest form.

As a nerdy kid, over a few years I read my way through a significant chunk of the early 1990's Groliers Encyclopedia set my Grandma bought me at Krogers. And it was never cover-to-cover reading, instead it was filled with hopping around, page-to-page, volume-to-volume. Start at oscilloscope, but what's a cathode ray? And then it's in television? How does broadcasting work? I'd sit on the floor with a half dozen open encyclopedias open around me, the same way we can do now with browser tabs.

Wikipedia has many flaws, but it's a fantastic tool and I'd have killed for it as a 12 year old with 5 volumes of an encyclopedia in my backpack!

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