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Fall Through A Wormhole Into This Stunning Wikipedia Galaxy

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There are a 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and the Milky Way is relatively small on the cosmic scale. Luckily, there aren't nearly as many Wikipedia articles: with only 4,668,117 entries published to the English Wikipedia as I write this, stars outnumber those Wikipedia entries 1,867 to 1. From that perspective, Wikigalaxy—a beautiful new visualization of Wikipedia that transforms Wikipedia into a virtual galaxy and maps every entry to a star in a distant nebula—isn't exactly a one-to-one mapping. But when your core idea is this cool, it doesn't need to be.

Click a "star" and the associated Wikipedia entry loads in a panel on the left side of the screen, while the panel on the right shows any other articles related to it. Related articles will be in close proximity to one another, depending on how many links there are between them, and if enough articles interlink, Wikigalaxy will even have specific subject areas clustered together into star systems that, in real terms, would be millions of light years across (for example, the works of Philip K. Dick, or vacation spots). And if you really want to explore Wikipedia in a new way, you can click a "Fly" button to zoom between the stars of the Wikigalaxy, like some sort of "Citation Needed" Silver Surfer.

Designed by Owen Cornec, a French computer science student, and currently in beta, Wikigalaxy only has 100,000 Wikipedia articles mapped as of writing. But Cornec promises that by the time Wikigalaxy goes gold, every Wikipedia article will be represented. Check Wikigalaxy out for yourself here: if you've ever fallen down a Wikipedia wormhole (and who hasn't?), this is a fantastic visualization of where you end up.


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