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Explore Wikipedia Like a Windows XP Desktop

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Re: Explore Wikipedia Like a Windows XP Desktop

#71

Post by TuringTest »

cube00 wrote: post #37

This is really impressive. It's exactly what I imagined the original Microsoft Network in Windows 95 would have been like. And so The Microsoft Network wasn't a program you loaded like CompuServe. It was part of the OS, with folder icons that looked just like real folders. It was a kind of version of the Web where you could browse online data the same way you browsed your file system. This is what made it cool. It wa…

> They had this project called Cairo that was supposed to throw out that scruffy old file-based filesystem and bring in a shiny new Object Based File System instead. It never happened, so we'll never know exactly how it might have turned out.

Nowadays we call those APIs. They are REST based rather than file-based to make them distributed, the main difference is that you don't get a common user interface that all providers adjust to; you need to choose your own client to read them and write into them.

And because they're created by programmers for programmers, they're not what you'd call user-friendly. Usually the only efficient way to use them is programmatically, so that you need to create a specific user interface for each API. Somehow, I doubt that Cairo would have come to be anything much different from that in the end.

Re: Explore Wikipedia Like a Windows XP Desktop

#72

Post by moffkalast »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #65
moffkalast wrote: post #44

Ok this is a genuinely perfect way to research an entire field by article instead of having to jump recursively link to link and forgetting what you were doing 5 minutes ago. I've never seen wikipedia from this categorized vantage point. If we're being real their UX is kinda crap outside the usual search->article->link flow and could use a complete rework.

Lucky 10000? Three tricks if you didn't already know: 1: you'll find categories at the bottom of regular mediawiki pages 2: if you click one, you'll end up on a page like eg. this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computers 3: the tree style tabs plugin in combination with middle-click is criminally underrated for navigating hierarchical data. (middleclick open-in-new-tab is only mildly handy, tree style tabs s…

TIL, I think I've landed on these pages a decent number of times but never from wikipedia's internal nav. I assumed they were more of an adhoc occasional thing, not a standard for sorting all pages.

Re: Explore Wikipedia Like a Windows XP Desktop

#74

Post by zozbot234 »

cube00 wrote: post #37

This is really impressive. It's exactly what I imagined the original Microsoft Network in Windows 95 would have been like. And so The Microsoft Network wasn't a program you loaded like CompuServe. It was part of the OS, with folder icons that looked just like real folders. It was a kind of version of the Web where you could browse online data the same way you browsed your file system. This is what made it cool. It wa…

> This is really impressive. It's exactly what I imagined the original Microsoft Network in Windows 95 would have been like.

That's actually not far off. It was an old-fashioned BBS like Compuserve in a Windows Explorer-like window. The topic-specific icons you see in this mockup are actually very on-point, though on the Microsoft Network they would be for general BBS sections not encyclopedic articles or media.

Re: Explore Wikipedia Like a Windows XP Desktop

#75

Post by pndy »

cube00 wrote: post #37

This is really impressive. It's exactly what I imagined the original Microsoft Network in Windows 95 would have been like. And so The Microsoft Network wasn't a program you loaded like CompuServe. It was part of the OS, with folder icons that looked just like real folders. It was a kind of version of the Web where you could browse online data the same way you browsed your file system. This is what made it cool. It wa…

Somehow this reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373 released by CERN on 30th anniversary. Pretty sure Berners-Lee in recent years was contributing to decentralized web/Internet concept that does also reminds a little bit of early WWW.

There was also this submission from 9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13361523 - and probably not the only one of such ideas

Re: Explore Wikipedia Like a Windows XP Desktop

#76

Post by zozbot234 »

fleabitdev wrote: post #61
darkwater wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A folder system doesn't have to be strictly rigid, you can still have "symlinks" so the same article appearing in different folders (aka labels if you can easily duplicate content inside folders, but you retain the nested, drill-down approach)

Wikimedia Commons has this feature. Editors can manually bless certain combinations of traits as "subcategories". For example, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Paintings_of_cas... contains the subcategories "Paintings of castles by country" (nested hierarchy), "Frescos of castles" (a medium), "Paintings of Château de Chillon" (a subject), and "Young Knight in a Landscape by Carpaccio" (multiple views onto…

> I'd prefer for each item to have an unstructured set of tags ("fresco", "depiction of a castle", "depiction of Italy"), with automatic derivation of parent tags ("fresco" implies "painting") and the option to search by multiple tags.

It's definitely possible to do this. IMSLP (a large repository of freely available sheet music, which differs by cross-cutting features such as genre, historical period, contributors (composers and others), instrumentation etc.) is MediaWiki based and has a plugin that does exactly that. These days the would probably want to host all the tags on Wikidata so that they can be multilingual and queryable out of the box, though.

Re: Explore Wikipedia Like a Windows XP Desktop

#77

Post by bawolff »

cheschire wrote: post #39
hliyan wrote: post #28

Incredibly beautiful, possibly because it maps so well to the mental model we typically use to organize knowledge in our heads. I don't know how we lost the folder/container vs. document/content iconography, and other things (like layout of items, sorting) during the shift to web applications.

Knowledge doesn’t neatly align to a nested hierarchy. Especially written knowledge. Language is an imperfect means to convey knowledge, and people store that knowledge in subjective and highly personal ways. You may mentally recall balloons within “entertainment” or “party”, whereas I might store that knowledge under “horror”. Add onto that the massive focus on using graph theory to scale social networking technologi…

> Knowledge doesn’t neatly align to a nested hierarchy. Especially written knowledge.

The category tree being displayed comes directly fron wikipedia. E.g. Wikipedia has pages like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Art

Re: Explore Wikipedia Like a Windows XP Desktop

#78

Post by bawolff »

zozbot234 wrote: post #76
fleabitdev wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikimedia Commons has this feature. Editors can manually bless certain combinations of traits as "subcategories". For example, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Paintings_of_cas... contains the subcategories "Paintings of castles by country" (nested hierarchy), "Frescos of castles" (a medium), "Paintings of Château de Chillon" (a subject), and "Young Knight in a Landscape by Carpaccio" (multiple views onto…

> I'd prefer for each item to have an unstructured set of tags ("fresco", "depiction of a castle", "depiction of Italy"), with automatic derivation of parent tags ("fresco" implies "painting") and the option to search by multiple tags. It's definitely possible to do this. IMSLP (a large repository of freely available sheet music, which differs by cross-cutting features such as genre, historical period, contributors (…

Which is actually done on commons, it just isn't very popular (on images, click the structured data tab and then look at depicts) [admittedly i think a big part of the problem is is implementation choices and UI decisions].
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