Explore Wikipedia Like a Windows XP Desktop

The shininess looks a bit more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_Media_Center_Editio... and not like the regular Windows XP, but still a fun project!

chuckadams2• 2 months ago

Definitely not MCE: the title bars are bright blue with the "Fisher-Price" orange buttons, which was the hallmark of regular XP.

AMerrit• 2 months ago

Yeah it's def going for an XP clone feel. Although it's not 1:1, I assume to skirt copyright.

angilr4• 2 months ago

It is nice. I randomly click on something interest just appear in my mind and lead to this: life -> death -> last_words -> More milk. But I can't find it on Wiki. I search More milk. and the first result is this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Michael_Jackson. Hmm, why is the name different?

flexagoon• 2 months ago

"More milk" is a redirect to that page

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=More_milk.&redire...

The "Windows XP" website displays the same article when you click on "More milk" there

angilr4• 2 months ago

Wow, do you know what is the relationship between More milk and the death of MJ?

jdw64• 2 months ago

Seeing the Windows XP theme I loved the most really brings back a wave of nostalgia

redox99• 2 months ago

Is there a reason why it looks like Temu's Windows XP? Copyright concerns I guess?

sunaookami• 2 months ago

Because it's obviously vibe coded (look at the source code).

Gualdrapo• 2 months ago

Not sure why they downvoted you because you have a point - icons are not the same as Windows XP's, wallpaper flat color reminds me more of Win 95/98 and the taskbar design has some details that do not match precisely with Windows XP's. I'd also bet it's due to copyright concerns

freshollie• 2 months ago

Probably cos it's vibe coded?

The main CSS comes from XP.css [0], but the AI additions [1] have definitely messed it up in some way.

The whole thing is pure JS which is nice but the comments give a good impression isn't not hand written IMO [2]

[0] https://github.com/botoxparty/XP.css/

[1] https://explorer.samismith.com/css/base.css

[2] https://explorer.samismith.com/js/explorer.js

weezing• 2 months ago

Ask LLM to make a 98/XP styled website and you will discover the reason.

macwhisperer• 2 months ago

pretty cool! needs the search function to work tho to be useful

neutralx• 2 months ago

It kinda stays true to the Windows File Explorer as its search was always mostly useless

sagacity• 2 months ago

This is genuinely a really fun way to browse Wikipedia. Only drawback is that folder names that contain ellipsis don't show the full name when clicked.

hellosami• 2 months ago

If you click on the tile icon at the top of the window, you can have it display as a list!

crabmusket• 2 months ago

Where does the hierarchical classification come from?

boshomi• 2 months ago

Wikipedia category namespace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles

underlipton2• 2 months ago

Sorta?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Art

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:The_arts

pixlmint• 2 months ago

Such a cool project! Now it's just missing search and a request for donations

emil-lp• 2 months ago

It's also missing the defrag tool. Without it, it's going to be very slow as the disk fills up.

Should put a shortcut to it on the desktop as well, so that users who experience significant lag can defrag at will.

kramit1288• 2 months ago

This looks really cool. feels nostalgic. it would be more fun if it can be switched into whatever desktop mode i want like unix.

steveharing1• 2 months ago

What a beautiful nostalgic feeling. Keep up the good work! Worth adding some start menu options as well.

hnlmorg• 2 months ago

I guess appearance is subjective because I always considered XP to be the ugliest Windows ever released.

arnon• 2 months ago

make it look like encarta 95 and you'll have a REAL winner on your hands

DeathArrow• 2 months ago

Well, it should also have Solitaire and Minesweeper. :)

Eonexus• 2 months ago

This is just beautiful. I wonder if this could turn into different styles, like that of a book, or a cabinet?

hliyan• 2 months ago

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.

sznio• 2 months ago

I guess this model doesn't maximize engagement

cheschire• 2 months ago

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 technologically, and you effectively lose any motivation for rigid hierarchy.

darkwater• 2 months ago

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)

agilek• 2 months ago

Yes, and it sad the search in this UI doesn’t work…

bawolff4• 2 months ago

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

chuckadams2• 2 months ago

I dunno, I never had a "Sheep Looking at Viewer" category in my mental model until I randomly clicked around the media folder.

9x39• 2 months ago

I agree, for some reason I have always alternated between wanting not just the universal search box but a browsable hierarchy to mentally run my fingers over and discover in a structured way.

We let go of the the manual index somewhere along the way since it doesn’t scale like search, obviously, but for the same reason I keep a library and enjoy traversing others’ private ones and visiting public ones, I keep coming back to browse.

queuebert2• 2 months ago

This is why I frequently post about how I miss Gopher. It kind of forced this hierarchy.

jasonfarnon• 2 months ago

Did you prefer the Yahoo/internet frontpage approach to google search though? I didn't, but I remember a time when it was a live debate. It has been interesting to see some sites like youtube or wikipedia evolve a quasi-hierarchical frontpage though.

koolala4• 2 months ago

trying to find what folder has Дэбі робіць Даляс

bawolff4• 2 months ago

Presumably none, since its only searching english wikipedia, and that looks to be belarusian.

koolala4• 2 months ago

I don't think most things are ever limited to one language like that. Also, Hacker News doesn't let you delete your own comments?

tigerlily• 2 months ago

Oh wow, to me the history section feels like Civilopedia (in a good way). I can't explain why.

dunderd• 2 months ago

Very cool!

Uptrenda• 2 months ago

Somehow the format makes me feel like its easier to learn here than the intimidating encyclopedia theme of wikipedia. It's interesting to consider the effect that presentation of information might have on learning. We know that physical books are said to be better for learning (I have heard people go up by an entire grade if they use them), but maybe there is something to be said for themes, too.

cube00• 2 months ago

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 was as if the data was suddenly free of the shackles of being displayed in a program. Data wasn't just a web page, or a program showing its own internal databases. The Microsoft Network made it look like the data was right there, and you could click it and drag it around! For a brief time, back in 1995, it felt like we were on the verge of the true object-oriented web, a world filled with open data and free from the tyranny of the walled gardens.[1]

It also reminded me what an excellent job Wikipedia does with their hierarchical classification which you don't see when you're often only searching by article name.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260129143542/https://www.coder...

dwedge• 2 months ago

That really sounds like the idea behind Plan9. Interesting.

TuringTest• 2 months ago

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.

zozbot2343• 2 months ago

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.

pndy2• 2 months ago

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

Digit-Al• 2 months ago

Are you mabe thinking of Solid[1]? This is an interesting idea, and I have looked into it on several occasions recently, but despite it being around for a really long time it appears to be going exactly nowhere, unfortunately.

It seems a bit of a missed opportunity really. If they had more agressively pursued alliances, it could potentially have been a solid (pun only semi intended) foundation for Mastadon and Bluesky.

The name is unfortunate as well, it is really difficult to search for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_pr...

pocksuppet2• 2 months ago

Talk about data being separate from programs always reminds me what a good job Microsoft did with the spacial filesystem (that means one folder is one window, and they remember their location), single-document interface (a UI paradigm) and COM (a cross-process communication system). As a novice user not understanding a whole lot about the system, your documents were in the operating system and not in a specific program (this still wasn't perfect and a lot of new users did think their documents were in programs, which might be why we gave that up) and those programs could talk to each other and embed each other's documents.

This stuff probably seemed moderately innovative if you didn't grow up with it, seemed blindingly obvious if you did grow up with it, and somehow, like idiots, we've managed to lose it again!

anthk• 2 months ago

OLE objects are just FAT like filesystems; nothing too disimilar to Unix if it mounted disk images with text files and different images with it in order to create a document format.

funimpoded• 2 months ago

this still wasn't perfect and a lot of new users did think their documents were in programs, which might be why we gave that up

To this day there exist office workers—ones old enough that no, it's not because the were introduced to computers via smartphones—who use a computer for hours every single weekday day but get totally turned around in a file manager, and don't know even the extreme basics like how to copy and move files.

There are offices full of such folks, in non-tech offices, where the person who knows how to sort-of use a GUI file manager is the "computer whiz" they go to with questions.

crazygringo• 2 months ago

It also reminded me what an excellent job Wikipedia does with their hierarchical classification

As someone who once tried to use that supposedly hierarchical classification for data organization, it is unfortunately not excellent at all.

It is rather arbitrary, inconsistent, extremely incomplete, and not infrequently circular. Think of it more like a bunch of haphazardly applied tags that make perfect sense in the context of a single page, but quite frequently make very little sense when you look at the actual pages and sub categories that belong to a category. Category membership is just not something visible enough for it to wind up being organized and curated in any kind of systematically accurate way.

On the other hand, the presence of an infobox of a certain type is extremely reliable for categorizing many types of articles.

eur0pa• 2 months ago

Beautiful memories of browsing random topics in Microsoft Encarta '97

soupspaces• 2 months ago

Is there a way to go up/back a folder without clicks? Enter key goes into folders.

rigonkulous• 2 months ago

I'd like to see a gource interface to Wikipedia, personally ..

moffkalast2• 2 months ago

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.

Kim_Bruning2• 2 months ago

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 seems tepid by itself without it)

moffkalast2• 2 months ago

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.

woodydesign• 2 months ago

This is so Cool! Great concepts and execution. I could imagine this way of interaction and exploration apply to Educational area

lavela• 2 months ago

I feel like the 100 or so uncategorized articles should lie either directly in home or clutter the desktop for a more authentic experience.

ernstgnzlz• 2 months ago

Amazing work!

fstepho• 2 months ago

I love it! Congrats !

peppevignanello• 2 months ago

This is actually so cool

jimmydddd• 2 months ago

Thanks! This is great.

guilhermesfc• 2 months ago

Super nice. Congrats

jwr• 2 months ago

Large scrollbars! Windows with borders! What a relief!

This has become a forgotten art: we focus so much on CONTENT these days that we forget that people want to use the mouse to scroll, and use the mouse to resize windows.

lukan• 2 months ago

Hm. It is a clear UI, but I would prefer more space for the content.

__natty__• 2 months ago

I agree. We focus on content where usually it’s so poorly structured and displayed it lacks final touches. I prefer wider scrolling bar than extra white space in the browser. Same goes for finder. I find old systems to be much more usable for me than modern ones

MK2k• 2 months ago

this needs to be an offline bootable usb version :)

brynnbee2• 2 months ago

I did something similar for my personal site :)

https://brynnbateman.com/

cousin_it• 2 months ago

I lasted less than one minute. Can't read anything when there's an unstoppable animation in peripheral vision going blinky blinky blink.

brynnbee2• 2 months ago

Taking about clippy? If so that's good feedback! I'll make it disappear after a couple seconds. Thanks!

blks• 2 months ago

It’s too snappy for a windows xp experience.

piyiotisk• 2 months ago

what tech stack does it uses?

ZoomZoomZoom• 2 months ago

This is cute, but the UI is uncannily not there (I think there were multiple attempts of designing the XP for web already which looked more authentic).

But my biggest gripe is, why represent it as a file system with WordPad displaying HTML? I get the idea for media, but not for the articles.

It's pretty obvious that Wikipedia should be a single CHM file. That would be nice and much more immersive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help

klaussilveira• 2 months ago

CHM files were great, it actually made documenting enjoyable. I miss those days.

underlipton2• 2 months ago

There seems to be some editorializing in category choice, which makes this a bit of a no-go for me. I'll just use the real thing.

jovial_cavalier• 2 months ago

I really want a linux virtual filesystem that does this.

sjreese• 2 months ago

Impressive, I will use it

jan_Sate• 2 months ago

That's pretty fun to play with. Whoever made it, good job! :D

a1o• 2 months ago

Can I run this offline?

bovermyer• 2 months ago

This is fantastic. And I really appreciate that it doesn't pollute my history API with a bunch of exploration marks.

gargola_• 2 months ago

It doesn't work for me. Nothing clickable opens anything or do anything for that matter. Am I the only one experiencing this?

dustinroepsch• 2 months ago

This is what Rocky brought home to the Eridians

nickburns• 2 months ago

Okay, okay... *enables JavaScript for explorer.samismith.com*

OkGoDoIt• 2 months ago

I’m surprised the search function in the start menu doesn’t do anything. Seems like that would be super useful. But I did enjoy this, nice job with the polish.

basilgohar• 2 months ago

Windows XP's desktop rendered as a web page is snappier.

ShinyLeftPad2• 2 months ago

Honestly, a testament to current Wikipedia design, because while it's fun to click around it's literally impossible to find what you need in this kind of GUI. (Geofile explorer is simply baffling.)

Yajirobe• 2 months ago

What does Wikipedia do differently? I don't think I have ever used Wikipedia's internal navigation - if I want to find something I usually type 'XYZ wikipedia' into Google and click the first link.

ShinyLeftPad2• 2 months ago

I often use category links on the bottom or in the sidebar when researching. Also I use search, which doesn't work in this alternative GUI. Sometimes I check the article in another language.

kanswam• 2 months ago

Wikipedia has come a long way since they started where anyone can go in and update the pages without having it verified...

maxglute• 2 months ago

Neato. I will never understand how microsoft settled on that vomit teal.

sharts• 2 months ago

This is kinda not dissimilar to old school 90’s yahoo.com.

person3• 2 months ago

Having used Windows XP this bothers me because it's just slightly off.

solarized• 2 months ago

beautiful. please change doublr click to single click when open the folder.

Explore Wikipedia Like a Windows XP Desktop

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