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 program also generates date-bounded Google News and Google Web searches for the busiest page view days so you can explore external information sources with some time-based context.
I built WMC because I spend a lot of time looking things up in Wikipedia, but Wikipedia is such a massive collection of data at this point I find myself wanting to apply filters of context to get it down to a reasonable, navigable size. In this case I’m applying time-based human attention filters in the form of page view analysis. If I’m researching a topic and looking for experts, I can explore with this. If want to do recent historical research (WMC works back to January 2017), I can explore with this. If I’m doing prospect research and want to find some people to background, I can explore with this. Basically WikiCat Main Characters is for finding interesting people in categories. To explore those individuals in more depth, use MegaGladys.
I spent a few days playing with WMC, which was both fun and annoying. Fun, because this tool is a great rabbit hole generator (you’re browsing the food executives category and the next thing you know you’re reading about the CEO of Chobani buying Anchor Brewing), and annoying, because there wasn’t enough information to help me really explore. So I did some upgrades and added some features and here we are with WikiCat Main Characters 1.1. It’s still free, still free of ads, and still works best on desktop. Let me tell you about these new features.
New Filtering Choices
The new WMC lets you limit your results to living persons only (it does this by looking for a Wikidata property for death date, so nonliving people with no death dates might appear in your search results; this doesn’t seem to happen very much.) You can also specify whether you want to explore by recently-popular (biggest page view jumps in the past month) or overall popularity (most page views overall.) The results are still divided into three tiers based on traffic. Finally, you can set how many people you want to view in each tier, from the original 3 up to 20.
New Detail Card
The original WMC had just a tier view of main characters, which was quickly unsatisfying. So I added a detail card view. Now when you click on a listing’s “More Info” button, you’ll get a detail card that provides some introductory Wikipedia text about the person, a list of busy page view days over the last six months, and some official external information and social media presences as reported by Wikidata.
These new updates make it easier to explore the over one million living people listed on English-language Wikipedia by giving you an understandable context (time-based human interest) to build your browsing around. Enjoy!
