WikiCloud.app — Discover knowledge.

Hey all! Here's a simple project we worked on during the first covid lockdown. The starting idea was simple, we wanted to create a different way of browsing for Wikipedia. In summary, WikiCloud gets the most clicked titles for a certain date from Wikipedia and displays them in a word-cloud. This word-cloud shows more clicked titles as larger words and vice-versa. It supports nearly all the languages that Wikipedia supports. Some issues you might encounter; - For whatever reason some adblockers block Wikipedia api's. It's due to the fact that the Wikipedia api's look like `[https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v.......`. And the `metrics/pageviews` part is triggering ad-blockers. You can disable the ad blocker for [wikicloud.app](http://wikicloud.app) domain, as we don't have any ads, and we only have very simple Google Analytics integration to be able to see how many people visited our application. - Wikipedia has some irrelevant pages like Homepage or Statistics etc. The names of those pages are different in all languages, therefore filtering all of them out was hard. They pollute the word clouds in most languages, but if you'd like us to filter them out in your language, please just reach out, I will be happy to do so. Example English filtered out words: Main_Page, User, Wikipedia, wiki, Talk, Message, Category, Template, Portal, File. - Sometimes it might lock up and show no results, the simple solution is to refresh or change languages around and back. Of course, there was some Apple drama while we were developing this application. We initially wanted it to be a mobile app, go enrolled in Apple's subscriptions, and whatnot. After getting rejected few times due to "the application is just being a bunch of URLs, has no value in AppStore" and "not creating long lasting user interactions like in-app purchases or forcing user accounts". One of the core values we had while developing it was to try to not get between the user and information, and Apple tried to force us to make our application just like any other application. We decided to not pursue the mobile app dream anymore and release it as a web application. Some backstory... When I learned reading back in my childhood, I used to just take one of those huge(it was huge for my size back then 🙂 ) encyclopedias(Encyclopædia Britannica, etc) and read some titles at random. It was a really nice learning experience that I wasn't able to replicate with any other online tool. Of course, the big reason is, I don't have *that* much time to waste, so I don't want to read totally random titles. I think WikiCloud solves some of the problems by showing me only relevant information from the near past which I can use to reinforce what happened recently in the world or just pure discovery. So I do enjoy browsing wikicloud in my free time, when I am commuting, waiting in line etc. I simply replaced my social media browsing mostly with wikicloud and I think you should also give it a try, especially in the age where we started noticing how they are hurting our societies. Have fun!