While it’s important to stay informed about what’s going on in the world, endlessly scrolling through your social media feeds and absorbing what is likely a negative flow of information isn’t good for your mental health. Perhaps with an eye to stop you from doomscrolling, developer Lyra Rebane did Wikipediaa social media-style feed of Wikipedia entries.
The web app algorithmically displays information from Simple Wikipedia. “This is done as a demonstration of how even a basic non (machine learning) algorithm without data from other users can quickly learn what you engage in to suggest you more similar content,” the Xikipedia landing page reads. “No data is collected or shared here, the algorithm runs locally and the data disappears once you refresh or close the tab.”
You can choose to view entries from several categories (including custom ones) and you can also select “posts,” each of which is a summary of the related Simple Wikipedia entry. Liking a post makes it more likely that posts from the same category, parent categories and linked articles will appear in your feed, Rebane explained.
You can click or tap on a post to visit the full article. It’s important to note that, since Xikipedia pulls text and images from random articles, you might see some NSFW material if you scroll for too long, so be warned. You can also wait a beat for Xikipedia to load its 40MB of data.
As one who has a bookmark which brings me to a random Wikipedia article every time I click on it, I like the idea of Xikipedia. Simple English Wikipedia has more than 278,000 articles, so there are hundreds of thousands of posts available to scroll through. However, it is not as frequently updated as the main version of Wikipedia. The discography section of a musician’s page I know is missing their two most recent albums. However, it deserves to be treated like Wikipedia: as a starting point for discovering new things (as in the tradition of StumbleUpon).







