[Wikipedia-l] wikibrowser

Wed Oct 27 11:37:42 UTC 2004

hi everybody
has anyone of you heard of or played around with touchgraphs wikibrowser 
(http://www.touchgraph.com/TGWB_101_SS.html)? this is a great step 
forward to intuitive wiki navigation!
i really wonder why this hasn't come up onto the agenda long ago. all it 
takes for the current version of tgwikibrowser is a plaintext list of 
immediate links from one page (or all the pages in sorted order). this 
is accomplished by most wiki implementations by giving the url 
http://wikiurl/mainpage?action=links&mimetype=text/plain or something 
similar.
to start with, mediawiki doesn't seem to know such a feature. why?? if 
we had that kind of "specialpage" and if we could adapt tgwikibrowser so 
that it could only read out all the links for one page at a time and 
retrieve the links of clicked pages on demand, this would produce no 
more load than simple navigation through the textual interface.
what's more, one could even think of a semantic navigation, employing 
the categories as "big bubbles" in the wikilink graph and their 
corresponding articles as "small bubbles" - effectively giving the user 
a kind of is-a ontology navigation tool with categories acting as 
classes and articles as a kind of class instance similar to visulization 
solutions in common ontology editors like protege. think of a wikipedia 
that you can navigate in the same way as offered by such beautiful tools 
like http://www.visualthesaurus.com/ etc.
anyone in favor of such a development? i could definitely contribute 
some concrete ideas...
best
kai, better know as
user:kku