Wikijumps

If you’re looking for easy pub trivia, don’t come to Madison. College town plus beer culture. People’s scores aren’t fake; they aren’t cheating; knowing the capital of Zambia is table stakes. This was a hard pill to swallow. I’m a lifelong trivia buff and I feel straight up mediocre here.

A few months ago I did some idle brainstorming around how one would even go about “training” for trivia in the first place. One thing led to another, and after much shoving-together of Javascript libraries, I must now present, for your time-wasting pleasure, Wikijumps.

One of the lynchpins that let me make this (Mike Bostock’s d3.js was another) is that there’s an API (which you can test out here) that lets you see, for a given Wikipedia article, the other articles that are most connected to it, as measured by the way Wikipedia users tend to travel via links.

In a nutshell, Wikijumps visualizes the top several links for whatever article you choose, then lets you check out the other articles (and set them as the new “center”) at your leisure.

I’ve gone down some pretty excellent rabbit holes with it already. Like have you heard of kabaddi? It’s a whole-ass sport, with a World Cup and everything, where the game mechanic is literally: you try to tag people for as long as you can yell “kabaddi.” I shudder to think that I might have gone my whole life without knowing it existed.

You can find what little you need to know about how to use it under the “i” button in the right-side menu, and if you’re curious about the source code, you can check it out here. (It’s licensed with our old friend the GPL.)

Happy jumping. 🦘