A couple of years ago, a French programmer made a 3D-space simulator from 50,000 of the most popular articles on Wikipedia. The Wikiverse has recently been updated, and is now 5x larger than it was before. The end result is a full blown, interactive, interconnected Wikipedia universe, and if we may say, it’s bloody beautiful:
The more articles (or ‘stars’) on a topic, the brighter that region of space appears, and articles that are related to each other are closer in space. Zoom in on purple glowing bit from the centre/top left of the picture above, and it becomes the pop music galaxy:
Kid Rock and Aretha Franklin are separated by half a galaxy, which is, perhaps, as it should be.
Zoom in some more, and see The Beatles cluster.
Notice that the John Lennon articles want absolutely nothing to do with the Paul McCartney ones.
The guys over at Kill Screen have found some interesting information about the political quadrant of the universe, too:
“Donald Trump’s orbit… ranges from art deco to alcoholism, Dr. Seuss to Citizen Kane (1941), the Bible to conspiracy theories. Hillary Clinton’s, by comparison, is much more straight-laced: branching off from Clinton, like individual strands in a spider web, are links to political figures such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as the Cabinet of the United States and the American Bar Association.
It’s a great way to see heaps of connections you never would have thought would exist. It’s hours of good times trying to figure out how weird/wonderful links exist. Is it a coincidence that US Politics is so close to the Olympics, or is it something sinister?
It is, almost certainly, a coincidence.
Just like the real universe, looking at the entirety of existence can make you feel very small. Even pornography, arguably the most popular thing on the entire internet, is but a spec in the grand scheme of things:
Source: Kill Screen.
