I wish I could read Wikipedia like this

http://blog.assaflavie.com/wikipedia/

by assaflavie • 12 years ago

234 61 12 years ago

blog.assaflavie.com

alxndr• 12 years ago

Similar, but apparently "one-way": http://www.telescopictext.com/

mosselman• 12 years ago

I like your concept a lot. It would be great addition to reading complex things.

Svip2• 12 years ago

This already exists on Wikipedia.

Under preferences, select the Gadgets tab and enable "Navigation popups".

When hovering over a link in a Wikipedia article, a small popup will appear, in addition to some metadata about the link, the first paragraph of the article will appear, including links that may appear in that paragraph, which can also be hovered to make another popup appear.

dbbolton• 12 years ago

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation_pop...

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/lySrN1I.png

pietrofmaggi• 12 years ago

Well, Navigation popups seems something a bit different for me and not at all something intended for general consumption like the proposed changes (that I think is great).

First of all you need to have a Wikipedia account to enable them, and second this is something intended as an help for the editors. Wikipedia description of this function is:

"article previews and editing functions popup when hovering over links"

Svip2• 12 years ago

Well, even the Hovercards under Beta features also require a user account. And of course, there is the downside of now only having it enabled on the English Wikipedia.

What about the German or French Wikipedia? What about Wiktionary? Oh man, that is going to be hard.

Indeed, Navigation popups is not perfect and it is intended for editors first. But I mostly use it for speeding up my browsing.

But writing a general tool for all MediaWiki installations is going to be quite the task; a lot of MediaWiki wikis don't even have opening paragraphs like Wikipedia does (see Wiktionary for example). Sure, we can make some compromises and accept that non-encyclopaedia styled wikis don't apply to this tool.

I'd love to see a Firefox extension that did this. But for now; either Hovercards or Navigation popups provides the basics of the requested functionality.

neilk• 12 years ago

The OP's design for it is much nicer.

Navigation popups have been around since 2005, and while in some ways better than the OP's design (pictures!) this is useful enough to test it as default behavior.

Hover doesn't work on mobile, so perhaps they should appear if you click and hold for a few seconds.

3rd32• 12 years ago

Implementing it in HTML/CSS/JS certainly poses an interesting problem because, as far as I know, one cannot directly access individual, dynamically broken lines of text. One would probably have to wrap each word in a container and keep track of the absolute positions.

sksksk• 12 years ago

I find the Google Dictionary plugin is pretty good for reading wikipedia like this...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-dictionary-...

kubiiii• 12 years ago

I like it a lot, my use of wikipedia often leads to a bunch of opened tabs and a lack of focus on what I was looking for in the first place (which might also be a great thing depending on your mood).

tty• 12 years ago

Wikipedia currently has a Beta feature name Hovercards

You can enable it here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsec...

hugi• 12 years ago

Thank you! I've had this feature for about 10 minutes and I already find it indispensable.

medell• 12 years ago

Agreed! How have I lived without this...

gabemart• 12 years ago

Thanks! Here is a screenshot:

http://i.imgur.com/fXYAZgm.png

Unfortunately, it's not recursive, unlike "Navigation popups" described in what is currently the top comment. They are prettier though!

vxNsr• 12 years ago

This is a nice start, but I already see one issue with this that the "Navigation popup" doesn't have: nothing on the hovercard is clickable, and thus you can't go more than one level down a tree.

The navigation popups are great except that if you move the mouse off them then they close, so as you traverse down the tree you lose parents. And you kinda end up with the same issue as before only now you really have no idea how you got there because you don't even have the open tabs to guide.[0]

[0] http://imgur.com/RS0IEet.png

Inversechi• 12 years ago

Totally didn't know about this! Cheers for the heads up.

nashashmi• 12 years ago

I prefer Chrome's extension called Google dictionary. Every time I highlight a word, it pulls up a definition. Anywhere on the web.

err4nt• 12 years ago

OS X and iOS users can do this in Chrome and Safari, I think the shortcut it selecting a word and pressing Command-Control-D or something :)

JimWestergren• 12 years ago

Thank you for this, I love it.

r0h1t4sh• 12 years ago

It will be great to see this as a Chrome/FF extension.

brunorsini• 12 years ago

This reminds me of Apture, which Google acquired in 2011.

hngiszmo• 12 years ago

I want my computer to get a concept of what I know. It should then gray out stuff I know and linkify stuff that might be new to me. Semantic Web is the key word here. Decades of research went into that but this magic tool still is not anywhere near yet.

ygra• 12 years ago

Incidentally, this was what my diploma thesis was about. The basic idea was to have a single »text« that contains lots of possible branching or expansion points, depending on certain criteria. Depending on those criteria you'd get a expanded or contracted text to read that would be tailored to what you already know or are interested about. Altering the text in small parts (like [−1½] mentioned in another comment – I found that one much later, though) was one part of it; inline expansions if necessary or wanted were a possible UX enhancement I thought of (avoiding a completely static text where you'd have to tell the engine everything beforehand).

Use cases I thought of were mainly adjusting texts explaining things (e.g. Wikipedia, school books, etc.) to the already existing knowledge of the reader. So that an article explaining a concept could look radically different (and going into increasingly more detail) depending on what the reader already knows. One proof of concept I created was adjusting the German Wikipedia article on Turing machines to three different levels (school, 1st semester CS student, 4th semester CS student) [75.3]. What each level does is either explaining things differently or leaving out parts altogether (no need horrifying a pupil with formulae). So my main focus was on providing something that reads well (expanding things inline still incur a context switch because they're not part of the original narrative) and finding a way how to model such things. Nothing automatic because a clear semantic model is needed for that to work.

Thesis can be found at [0.046], it's in German, but the abstract is in English too. Just in case someone might be interested in that.

[−1½] http://www.telescopictext.com/ mentioned by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7602335

[75.3] http://hypftier.de/temp/turing.html – sorry, it's in German, but Google Translate seems to work fine.

[0.046] http://hypftier.de/temp/Diplomarbeit.pdf

CatsoCatsoCatso• 12 years ago

Telescope Text is very interesting, thanks for the link.

tim333• 12 years ago

Yeah, it would be an interesting format to produce a novel in. You could see the summarised story and expand the interesting bits.

christiangenco• 12 years ago

I enjoy your arbitrarily numbered references.

api_or_ipa• 12 years ago

This is why some IDEs allow you to to "peek" at a definition, for example.

Dewie• 12 years ago

Yeah... try to look up some category theory terms you found in the wild on Wikipedia. You will not be enlightened.

I guess this can be generalized to most mathematics on Wikipedia.

badgateway• 12 years ago

Didn't Ted Nelson suggest this sort of in-situ display for transclusion in Xanadu?

kristopolous• 12 years ago

Goes a bit beyond that, especially in the kablang navigation and sworfing but yes ... it definitely gets closer than the current one-way linking model of html.

assaflavie3• 12 years ago

About popups/tooltips/hovercards: I considered this approach, but decided to go with this sort of "inline" expansion for the following reasons:

1. A popup obscures the original text. This interferes with context, albeit admittedly to a much lesser degree than full-blown navigation, but still.

2. Multi-level popup hierarchies just don't look good, in my opinion.

3. You must dismiss a popup to continue, whereas with inline expansion you can just as well keep the expansion and continue reading.

4. The hover approach doesn't work as well for touch-devices (i.e. without a mouse).

TeMPOraL• 12 years ago

Agree with all four; I prefer inline expansion to popups as well. Especially 2/ - multiple popups can quickly lead to a mess on screen, just like on the Wikipedia's Navigation Popups screenshot, where it does not only look ugly, but the popups also obscure each other as well as the original text.

Zakuzaa• 12 years ago

tldr.io chrome extension does something like this

assaflavie3• 12 years ago

Thank you! Just tried it. I'm in love. :)

PhasmaFelis• 12 years ago

What we really need is for more Wikipedia writers to remember that it's an encyclopedia, not a technical reference manual.

softgrow• 12 years ago

Maybe the prose could be written to assume less knowledge and reduce the amount of other material needed for most people to understand? Alternatively as a user preference the prose could auto-include the meanings of some terms?

enscr• 12 years ago

I prefer popups (floating elements) instead of altering the flow of the document. The continuous re-flow of the document is distracting.

vacri• 12 years ago

I'm the same - I'm currently trying to use DuckDuckGo and familiarising myself to it, but it's driving me nuts as it reflows the results as it loads elements. I'll go to click on something only to have it move away as another element is loaded.

MichaelAza• 12 years ago

Wish granted: http://wikiballoons.tomodo.me/wiki/Main_Page

I also made a (by no means complete) POC more simmiliar to your animation which you're welcome to fork and improve: http://en.wikimore.tomodo.me/wiki/Main_Page

In general, whenever you want to improve a website - Tomodo is the place to go (http://tomodo.com/)

pandatigox• 12 years ago

Is it based on hover? Doesn't seem to be working for me (iPad)

owenversteeg• 12 years ago

Hmm. Your example doesn't work for me (Arch Linux Chromium 28). Tomodo is also broken in general when I tried to use it.

bachback• 12 years ago

welcome to Ted Nelson's original idea of hypertext. further information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hypertext

Holbein• 12 years ago

While the suggested feature would be a improvement, the real goal imho should be that each Wikipedia article can be read and understood by itself, without the need to go on a recursive yak shaving expedition through other articles first.

Wohui• 12 years ago

I don't see how that is feasible. Upvoting the analogy though.

dredmorbius• 12 years ago

Tree-style tabbed browsing makes tree-traversal style web browsing far more tractable.

Sadly, Chrome doesn't have a tree-style tabs mode, nor can it be provided by the existing Chrome extension format. There are a number of tree-style tab extensions for Firefox (e.g., "Tree Style Tab": http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en).

There are any of a number of changes to the browser model I'd very much prefer aimed at information management, as opposed to the web-applications centric focus of the past several years.

In an interesting departure, Kobo advertised among the features of its (Android-based) tablet a web browser which simplified pages to an easy-to-read view. Based on present pre-loaded apps bundles, it looks as if that was the Pocket browser, but I still find it interesting that this was pitched as a benefit to a largely nontechnical, literary audience. It certainly reflects my own growing dissatisfaction with present-generation browsers.

lewispollard• 12 years ago

I use the 'wikipedia quick hints' chrome extension and it works really well for me. It works kind of like the navigation popups already mentioned - but links inside the modal can also be hovered over, 'recursively'.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikipedia-quick-hi...

jasongrout• 12 years ago

The American Institute of Mathematics has been promoting "knowls", which is a very similar idea and implementation: http://www.aimath.org/knowlepedia/

Rob Beezer's free open-source linear algebra book uses these extensively to provide more details in proofs and in exposition. It's very nice. For example, click on the underlined blue text at http://linear.ups.edu/html/section-SSLE.html

zodiac• 12 years ago

I thought this was a really interesting idea and tried implementing it. You can check out the demo here:

http://xuanji.appspot.com/static/wikipedia.html

Note that the "sinusoidal wave" link isn't working, as it redirects to "sine wave"...gotta work around that :(

If you want to read/modify the code send a pull request to github.com/zodiac/xuanji.appspot.com/, the commit which implemented this is https://github.com/zodiac/xuanji.appspot.com/commit/872b40dc...

someguy1233• 12 years ago

It works well until you get too deep. Then it becomes unreadable.

Http://i.imgur.com/9lSpyxb.png

Aardwolf• 12 years ago

Since my primary language is Dutch, it's easy for me:

If I want a short article, read the Dutch version. If I want too many details, read the English version :)

ronaldx• 12 years ago

I have Dutch as a second language and can vouch for this - when an English article is convoluted and misses the point, I click on the Dutch link for a simpler version.

Goladus• 12 years ago

Any article on an advanced topic is going to be difficult if you lack prerequisite knowledge, no matter how fancy the cross-reference ui.

Raphmedia• 12 years ago

Take a look at https://github.com/sanketsaurav/easywiki which do exactly what he proposes and work on other websites when hovering wikipedia links!

ozh• 12 years ago

Neat idea, but the article also made me discover Basic English and its 850 words. Didn't know about that, I think that should be mentioned when you learn English.

Does anyone know of similar general purpose word sets for other languages?

jaynos2• 12 years ago

Does anyone know of similar general purpose word sets for other languages?

This would be great. All my attempts at learning a new language are thwarted by the seeming daunting nature of the task. 850 (or so) words? I could see myself doing that (and then continuing on to another few thousand words.

I believe Tim Ferriss did something like this for learning Japanese. He made the list himself, but published it for others. It's in "The 4 Hour Chef" and probably on his website.

jaynos2• 12 years ago

Self reply, I hope that's okay.

I looked into this more (had an urge to learn Spanish today). Frequency dictionaries might be a good place to start. Here's the Spanish one I found [1]. It's a dictionary sorted by frequency of use (in a 20 million word text survey) instead of alphabetically. I imagine you can find a similar dictionary for other languages.

[1] http://speak-spanish.ru/wp-content/uploads/A-FreDictSpan.pdf

epochwolf• 12 years ago

If you have a mac, you can right click on any word and choose "Look up in dictionary". The dictionary pulls definitions from it's internal dictionary and wikipedia.

I wish I could read Wikipedia like this

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