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Wikipedia Path extension for my browser?
April 11th, 2010 by Pierre-Luc Beaudoin

Dear Lazyweb,

On this partly-cloudy day of April, I’ve thrown myself at Wikipedia seeking mercy upon my insatiable need to know more about diverse subjects such as the International Phonetic Alphabet.  But, as with any visit to Wikipedia, I ended up reading about even more diverse subjects such as the Mortgage word (from Law French), the Arabic loanword Orange and the Merovingian dynasty.

This was all great to read upon (thanks Wikipedians!).  But I’d like an easy way to find my way back to the original piece.  I’d like a nice Firefox extension to draw for me the threads of articles I’ve read.  Each time I’d open a new tab it would create a new branch from this article.  When an article links to an already open tab, it should be identified with a dashed line.

I’ve drawn an example of what it could look like (click for more details):

My path through Wikipedia today

So please, tell me someone already wrote that piece of software? (It took me quite too long to draw this funny diagram).

Regards,

Pierre-Luc

NB: An attentive reader will realize that I like reading on History, Languages and History of Languages.


11 Responses

Elliott writes:
April 11th, 2010 at 16:12

Speaking of languages, I thought “divers” didn’t look right… I spell it with an ‘e’: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/diverse
Adding the the ‘e’ moves the emphasis from the first syllable to the second and slightly changes the pronunciation of the ‘i’.

Pierre-Luc Beaudoin writes:
April 11th, 2010 at 16:18

Heh Elliot: alright, I used the French spelling :) Fixed.

David Regev writes:
April 11th, 2010 at 17:01

Déjà vu! I think I’ve visited most of those pages before.

If your main use case is getting back to the root node, the simplest solution is to install Tab History (it works in Firefox 3.6 too, if you modify its maxVersion). So, if you opened the ‘Conlang’ page in a new tab my middle-clicking, that new tab will inherit its parent’s history. Thus, you can always get back to the ‘International Phonetic Alphabet’ page from anywhere in the tree, whether you’re in the original tab or in a spawned one.

There are some other add-ons that might fulfil your need better, (though I cannot say how good they are, as I haven’t tried them): Tree Style Tab, Tab Kit, and History Tree. The last one is especially intriguing

I suspect that your diagram was influenced by XKCD. I even mocked-up an alternative browser interface that made this visualization more prominent.

marens writes:
April 11th, 2010 at 18:44
Leonardo Fontenelle writes:
April 11th, 2010 at 21:44

Maybe this should be done by Wikipedia, not Firefox.

oliver writes:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:59

Would Zeitgeist be able to supply this data?

James writes:
April 12th, 2010 at 11:12
RainCT writes:
April 12th, 2010 at 14:05

Oliver: Ideally yes, but the current implementation doesn’t support this yet.

Goran Rakic writes:
April 12th, 2010 at 15:41

I did something similar as a student project for my Java course at the University back in 2007.

The source of this two nights hack as an Eclipse project is available at http://alas.matf.bg.ac.rs/~mr04069/pjwiki_mr04069_eclipse.zip and some screenshots are available at http://alas.matf.bg.ac.rs/~mr04069/pjwiki.pdf

leighman writes:
April 12th, 2010 at 17:08

@Elliott/Pierre-Luc ‘divers subjects’ is also correct, it’s just that ‘diverse’ is the one everyone uses these days :P
Also your submit comment button doesn’t display in Opera :(
Sorry this post is kinda pointless =D

Pierre-Luc Beaudoin writes:
April 12th, 2010 at 19:30

@Leighman: ah then, that would explain why my spell checker didn’t care.

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