Show HN: WikTok – A Recommendation UI for Wikipedia
This is great. I had a similar idea recently as I was reading Python documentation: suggest to me random technical things I would like to read or would benefit from reading. We could even have this for all text on the internet (and books), or for all webpages really.<p>I read a few dozen articles on my phone on Safari, here&#x27;s my feedback:<p>- implement some visual feedback like a swipe animation (the next&#x2F;previous article pulling in from the side or something that lets me quickly evaluate the next article like a minimap or its Contents) and increase the cancel zone a bit (it should be relative to phone width), it feels brittle, I feel like I have to be careful when scrolling.<p>- I wondered whether the swipe direction is a like&#x2F;dislike or if the direction doesn&#x27;t matter. I assumed it didn&#x27;t matter but turns out right goes back, but after you go back, left swipe gives you a new article instead of going back to the article you went back from, this is not good because I don&#x27;t mind swiping a few extra times as much as I mind losing an interesting article, so doing it this way means I need to consider anytime I want to go back whether I&#x27;m okay with losing the current article instead of having &quot;back&quot; be a safe operation. Also, maybe make it scroll the same way as TikTok, down. So I can scroll down for the next article after I scroll through the entire article or up to go back to the previous one, that way left&#x2F;right scrolls can be used for something else. This would make it hard to skip long articles, maybe make both left swipe and down swipe go to the next article? I&#x27;d have to test to see if it was a good idea.<p>- going back&#x2F;forward should preserve scroll position<p>- the back button doesn&#x27;t always work, I often lost articles I wasn&#x27;t done reading because<p>- scrolling up can refresh the page and lose my current article<p>- scrolling sideways on a table or long formula triggers a swipe<p>- I experienced some jank where I sometimes get sent to another page, I&#x27;m not sure why it happens maybe I refreshed and it sent me to a new recommendation<p>- I like that you removed citations and other &quot;cruft&quot;. I saw an empty Footnotes section header on &quot;Sub-pixel resolution&quot; that should&#x27;ve also been removed. Also, the articles have extra padding at the end from the last section that you should shorten<p>- sometimes when I click on an article while reading an article, I&#x27;ll get the article I clicked on recommended soon after, sometimes more than once actually<p>- some articles have lowercase titles but on WikTok they are capitalized<p>- image previews are lower resolution than they are when I open the page on Wikipedia, you might need 2x srcset directives to the image elements<p>- tapping on an image should open the max resolution image file<p>- I was recommended some genetics article and clicked through a couple articles and the algorithm didn&#x27;t start only suggesting those articles, which was good<p>- I got a place disambiguation page of some villages in Poland and then one of the villages, not very interesting<p>- improve the top text: drop the &quot;.org&quot;, just &quot;WikTok&quot; (it&#x27;s cleaner), make it the same sans serif font as the article or the serif of the headers and use an actual minimal shuffle icon and don&#x27;t make it part of the hyperlink (if you keep it a hyperlink at all, it should really be a button)<p>- some articles are more fundamental than others and should be recommended first. some articles (especially for math) require prerequisite knowledge so it&#x27;s less efficient to show me the more specific one first, I might waste time trying to understand regardless but it would be better to show me simpler articles first, I guess an advanced algorithm would have to try to intuit how much I know (simple heuristic: the average person doesn&#x27;t know what Lie groups are) and have some kind of graph of knowledge dependencies that Wikipedia articles form, probably from how they link to each other. At that point it&#x27;s more like teaching, you estimate what I know to guide me through the graph of concepts more efficiently<p>- preload the next page<p>- it seems like when I tab out you might not be tracking that and considering that as me still reading the article<p>- does the algorithm track how I scrolled the page, which words I dwelled on etc.? You could probably determine the level of my understanding of an article from how I scroll it and then re-suggest articles I didn&#x27;t understand or read fully<p>- external links in infoboxes aren&#x27;t clickable links, which is bad when the article is about a website and I can&#x27;t click to go to it<p>- some long, important articles I want to read but not right now<p>You&#x27;re solving a bit of a different problem than TikTok because there&#x27;s only 6 million Wikipedia articles (much less useful ones) so your &quot;power users&quot; would be people trying to read it (or some section of it) exhaustively over a longer period of time, so you might want to cater to that by letting people see more of what you track, like what articles they&#x27;ve read and show them long lists of related articles for the current article, so that you can see that you&#x27;re making progress instead of feeling that it&#x27;s an endless pit of information. You could paint links purple manually because I bet the browser starts to lose that data, or just make a global percentage progress bar... I think Wikipedia has some metadata for which project an article belongs to that you could use here as well.<p>Will you open source this?