Show HN: Infinite Scroll Wikipedia

https://retrohacker.github.io/wikiscroll/

by r3trohack3r • 5 years ago

13 10 5 years ago

retrohacker.github.io

Heya folks. I built this for myself a while back, a recent exchange in the comments on HN prompted me to share it as a Show HN.

I built it partially as a habit breaker.

I noticed I use social media (mostly) for information discovery. I asked myself what information I’m trying to discover and worked backwards to a healthier relationship with that discovery mechanism from there. Ended up with Wikipedia as a good source of information and then tried to build a similar mechanism to social media scrolling on top of it.

It’s an alternative to doom scrolling social media for me, where the fun facts are actually fun, little to no social outrage, and there isn’t any FOMO - the same content will always be there tomorrow.

network2592• 5 years ago

Thanks for sharing. This is a definitely a refreshing take on media feeds.

What is the logic for generating the feed? Is there some link hopping from article to article? Or is it based on some usage data (eg what article is more popular than usual today)? Or perhaps there is some altogether different logic?

r3trohack3r3• 5 years ago

Each article is stored as a separate json file (0.json, 1.json, …, n.json). I have a static file containing the total number of articles. I download that file first, and then Math.random() to pick each entry.

lbrito• 5 years ago

Very cool!

How hard would it be to add some kind of article category filtering? E.g. I only want to see articles about engines, or about the south pacific. I think Wikipedia has indexes with those.

TwoFerMaggie• 5 years ago

This is great and many thanks!

One question: would it be possible to make the font bigger on mobile (maybe it's possible to do it from user's end)?

tacone• 5 years ago

I also find the font too small. Would be great to be able to make it bigger.

Maursault• 5 years ago

I have this issue all over the web. I use mobile Safari, which has a way to increase page text size, but it doesn't work very well. I found a bookmarklet that will increase text size. Instruction is, create a bookmark (of anything). Edit the bookmark and paste in the Javascript below to replace the url stored in the bookmark.

    javascript:(function()%7Bvar%20t,n,i,x=0,s,p='x-large',z,f=0;t=document.getElementsByTagName('*');%20n=t.length;for(i=0;i%3Cn;i++)%7Bz=t%5Bi%5D.style;z.fontSize=p%7Dif(document.frames)x=document.frames;else%20if(window.frames)x=window.frames;if(x)%7Bs=x.length;while(f%3Cs)%7Btry%7Bt=x%5Bf%5D.document.getElementsByTagName('*');n=t.length;for(i=0;i%3Cn;i++)%7Bz=t%5Bi%5D.style;z.fontSize=p%7D%7Dcatch(e)%7B%7Df++%7D%7D%7D)()

When you need to increase text size, while on a page, click that bookmark

caoxhua• 5 years ago

very cool!

Somehow it makes me think of "Tinder for topic" - focus on a mobile app which uses ML algo to keep learning users' "keep" or "throw-away" to keep improving users' feed, I believe it have potential for a big hit.

It interested, I'm open for more brainstorm, :) (email: cao@columns.ai)

swordbeta• 5 years ago

Nice! I wanted to have the same but in my native language so I made a small clone: https://mtricht.github.io/wikiscroll/

r3trohack3r3• 4 years ago

Very cool! Thanks for sharing!

Show HN: Infinite Scroll Wikipedia

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