Wikipedia firefox extension wikicrumbs

29Dec/070

Wikipedia firefox extension wikicrumbs

Wikipedia is a huge timesink if you enjoy learning about things. At the end of the night, when I am winding down, I'll fire up wikipedia to look up something. It doesn't stop there. One thing leads to another and before you know it you've learned everything wiki knows on, oh, neolithic history.

When I expand my mind like this I manage to retain 10% or so of what I think I learn. The rest is being tossed around in the back of my brain. Sometimes I want to go back and remember how I got where I ended up on wikipedia, but the back button only takes you so far.

A year or so ago Jason Kottke had a meme based on a post by Matt Webb called wikipedia contrails. It was a neat exercise, but I found it tedious to have to scribble everything down. There are a couple of existing Firefox extensions that track your browsing on wikipedia: Wikipedia History and Wikimedia+. They let you look at the last six or ten pages you browsed in wikipedia, but there is no history or context to it.

I know it seems useless, but I think it'd be cool to have a Firefox extension that does the following:

Tracks what you've read on wikipedia.
Displays a sequential line of page titles.
Allows you to enter comments as you surf.
Shows you cool relationships among the items you've read.
Allows you to upload your surfing to a site to compare with others.

Would this particularly useful? It won't save the plant, but I think it'd be very cool.

Of course I have no experience programming Firefox plugins, in fact my programming experience stopped with Turbo Pascal. I figure it's going to be easy to find someone on the rent a coder sites to program something; the big deal is designing it.

You have to start with a name. Wikitrails seemed to be a logical choice, but there are a couple of things called wikitrails already. Oddly, none of them deal with following your surf patterns on wikipedia. I say oddly since one of them was about putting trail information into a wiki. Putting the creative cap on I thought about this being like Hansel and Gretel. All I want to do is find my way back to where I started and add some descriptive text along the way. Wikicrumbs seemed like a good choice and it was available.

The next step is to lay the system out and document the processes I think need to happen. I'm pretty good at that, so I anticipate looking for a programmer soon.