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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 64.2 ms ] threadAnd 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...
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.