Zack Aman

08 Apr 2015

Serendipiwiki is a Chrome extension aimed that tracks browsing through wiki’s and allows the user to save and cluster their browsing history. It then uses this information to surface articles that fill holes in your knowledge map or push you into new territory. Educate yourself by reading a single Wikipedia article per day.

Existing visualizations look at analyzing the entire structure of Wikipedia rather than thinking about the role of visualization and mapping for an end user. The goal of this project is to use user habits to create a navigable, personalized metastructure for Wikipedia.

Where I Am Now

I have the Chrome extension skeleton figured out and have history automatically recorded, as well as the ability to save things and go to random pages.

I’ve also downloaded Wikipedia in preparation for calculating a priori degree of interest for articles.

Where I’m Going

Features that I’m working on:

– degree of interest: calculate which articles (for all of wikipedia) are most interesting based on linkages in and out

– retroactive clustering: cluster your saved items as they make sense to you

– display map of connections: requires degree of interest calculation (from entire Wikipedia) as well as user clusters

– predictive surfacing along a spectrum: combine current saved articles with a priori degree of interest to provide articles along a spectrum from relevant to current clusters to generally interesting articles

– streak tracking: after providing articles, give the user a way to check off that they have read an article today and then keep track of their daily streak

– snipped highlighting: allow snippets from the page to be saved

Related Works

Chris Harrison’s WikiViz

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

Degree of Interest Paper