About This Tool

I worked on Wikidata Explorer for the first two days of the jam before burning out and running out of time to do anything else due to Life™.

My initial idea for this project can be summarized in a bulleted self-dialogue:

• Hmm, Wikidata has a lot of really neat info, but I find I don't browse it like I do Wikipedia... Is that because the UI doesn't encourage me to peruse it as much?
• Wikidata is basically a really really big graph, right?
• What if I could render that graph?
• I could then let the user click on nodes so that they can explore related topics and see how exactly they're connected to each other...
• If I execute this correctly, this could actually be a really productive exploration tool!

I still think that the potential for it to be that is still there, but in practice I wasn't able to easily do this. The main issue is Wikidata entries have a lot of edges (Japan has over three hundred), and making graphs where a small number of nodes have a large number of edges is really hard to manage; it's frustrating when your graph unknowingly explodes. I couldn't find or imagine a layout algorithm which would make this tool more human-friendly, so I just kinda set it aside. Graphs are not always the best UI tool, even if the underlying data is modeled as such.

I want to thank Jamie for hosting this jam (it's the first communal hacking session I've done since COVID!) and everyone in #hytradboi for being super chill and great people to talk to; can't wait to see everyone's awesome projects!