Navigating Wikipedia as a Live Graph
Wikipedia is already a graph. Articles are connected through categories, references, and links to other articles. Wiki-Tree was an early attempt to make that structure visible and explorable. Search for an article and it becomes the center of a navigable 3D graph. From there, the graph grows as you follow links, inspect related articles, and expand categories.
Exploring a graph, not displaying one
The obvious version of the project would be to try to visualize as much of Wikipedia as possible. That quickly becomes useless. A few hundred nodes are enough for a force-directed graph to turn into an unreadable mass. The interesting problem is how to explore a small, meaningful part of the graph, not how to display the whole graph.
Wiki-Tree grows the graph incrementally. An article is only expanded when the user asks to explore it; nodes can be focused, inspected, and removed. The visible graph is consequently not a representation of Wikipedia as a whole, but a temporary slice shaped by the user's path through it. The useful unit is not the complete graph, but the interaction loop around it: follow a relationship, reveal what is nearby, decide what is worth keeping, and continue from there.
A precursor project
Wiki-Tree started around 2012, originally as a small PHP and GraphViz experiment. It was subsequently rebuilt several times: first with D3.js and SVG, and eventually React with a Three.js-based renderer. Implementations changed, the underlying question remained: what does a large body of interconnected information look like when you explore it through its relationships rather than through its individual documents?
At the time, Wiki-Tree was mostly an experiment in interaction and graph representation. It never aimed to provide a definitive model of Wikipedia, and the visualization itself has obvious limits. But it established an idea that I would return to much later: sometimes the interesting thing about a collection of documents is not the documents themselves, but the structure that emerges between them.
Use the slider to explore the evolution of the project
