I’ve been playing with the idea of building a little wading pool of data that offers a limited but reasonably authoritative collection of information (in this case Wikipedia), and then exploring the relationships between those data to build more complex search engine queries that are less likely to get snared by junk Google results. I made […]
Upgrading WikiCat Main Characters
Last week I wrote about a new tool I made called WikiCat Main Characters. With WMC, you can search for Wikipedia categories by keyword and then explore the people within those categories to find the “main characters” — the people whose Wikipedia articles have had the biggest bump in pageviews over the past month. The […]
Finding the “Main Characters” in Wikipedia Categories
If I gave you a list of twenty people from Wikipedia and told you to list them in order of cultural prominence without consulting an external reference, how would you do it? You’d probably start by identifying people you know. You’d use your knowledge to sort them as best you could. But what about the […]
Shaking Wikipedia Categories to See What Pops Up
I’ve been spending the last few days playing with my favorite mental chew toy, the question “How do you ask for what you don’t know?” It’s an important question because every search engine query above a certain level of complexity involves filling in a knowledge gap. How you understand, define, and contextualize that gap means […]