Explore Wikipedia’s Infinite Web of Information in Galaxy Form

Sometimes you just want to kill time learning superfluous information on Wikipedia but just don’t know where to begin. Wikiverse, a data visualization app that turns the universe of articles on Wikipedia into a digital universe where every article is a star, is a good place to start. The app, by data visualization specialist Owen Cornec, was first created a few years ago but has been recently updated.

According to The Next Web, Wikiverse lets you zoom in and out to explore particular clusters of articles (for instance, musicians associated with Columbia Records). If you double click a particular star, a preview of that article will come up in the left-hand column, with a link back to the full information on Wikipedia. The closer two articles are together, the more alike they are. If the pages link to each other, they’re connected by a line.

The app is currently limited to English Wikipedia, compromised of more than 5.2 million articles. Understandably, it takes a lot of computing power to deal with that much information in an interactive way, so you can choose to see a galaxy of just 1 percent of the site (50,000 articles), 2 percent (100,00 articles) or 5 percent of the site (250,000 articles).

Here's an animated version of how it works:

[h/t The Next Web]

All images via Wikiverse.io

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