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Wikiverse is a project by data engineer Owen Cornec, an upgraded version of an old Chrome experiment called Wikigalaxy. It reimagines how Wikipedia could look – and how fun it can be to interact with interconnected articles. Via the Verge:
These sessions are illuminating, but I find myself snapping back to reality after an hour with no idea how I got to my last entry. Wikiverse could help solve that problem. The site casts Wikipedia’s pages as floating points of light in a 3D universe, clustering “stars” on the same topic — technology, society, music, etcetera — together. Click on a star and you can read its entry, as well as see the pages it links to, stretching across the universe as colored lines.
It’s an abstract reinvention of Wikipedia’s knowledge banks, but it’s surprisingly useful to couch the site’s billions of articles in a more visual form, showing the links between art, science, history, and other major topics. As well as being visually pretty, Wikiverse also shows just how much information Wikipedia holds — even when loading just 5 percent of the site’s contents, zooming in on a cluster gives me the same head rush I get when I think about just how many stars are in our real galaxy.