Show HN: Discover Wikipedia articles popular on Hacker News

Posted by octopus143 2 days ago

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Comments

Comment by moehm 2 days ago

Oh, nice execution. I had the same idea during the pandemic. Though my aesthetics are completely different as I focused more on the discussions on HN, as they often have some golden nuggets. Yours is of course way more polished, as I basically just slapped bootstrap on my database front end.

https://www.mostdiscussed.com/

Interesting how different our "popularity score" is though: https://www.mostdiscussed.com/popular

You don't seem to group them by category, right? I found it quite interesting: https://www.mostdiscussed.com/popular/topics

Btw, your "new" tab seems to be broken, as it is showing articles from 2019.

Comment by octopus143 2 days ago

Hey, nice project! I guess it is much easier now with claude/codex to get polished design fast.

I used to have topics etc but removed them for simplicity sake. Proabably makes sense to revert. I'll check out new filter (thanks for the pointing out)

Comment by octopus143 1 day ago

fixed the new fillter, thanks for heads up

Comment by gnatman 2 days ago

Cool! I’ve been using this bookmark for years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org

Comment by capitainenemo 2 days ago

Which is denser on information, faster to read, more accessible and works without javascript.

I did whitelist the orangecrumb domain for JS temporarily though. Does look neat, but not the the sort of interface I'm into.

Comment by lukan 2 days ago

"Which is denser on information"

Depends, it mostly shows those entries that were not popular or even flagged.

Comment by esafak 2 days ago

If you want more than that you can use HN's BigQuery free dataset. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40644563

Comment by mdp2021 2 days ago

> Discover Wikipedia articles popular on Hacker News

Wikipedia articles _and YT videos_.

Amazing result, very precious, just skimming in it for a few minutes was immensely enriching.

Comment by josters 2 days ago

Nicely done! Would be interesting to sort by upvotes and/or comment count as well.

Comment by moehm 2 days ago

I have something similar:

https://www.mostdiscussed.com/popular

Comment by captn3m0 2 days ago

Other modes worth trying: "Mailing Lists", "Research Papers"

Comment by octopus143 2 days ago

yes, absolutley, I was looking into it yesterday and there is a lot of potential

Comment by sa-code 2 days ago

This is an amazing interface for Wikipedia; at least for those of us who have their brains fried by "verticals"

Comment by octopus143 2 days ago

Thanks! I was inspired by the wikitok project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936723), but wanted to be able to dive into article a bit deeper.

Comment by hasudon7171 21 hours ago

Thank you for sharing. I would be very happy if it were available in multiple languages.

Comment by buynao 22 hours ago

It would be even better if it were multilingual.

Comment by tacone 2 days ago

Looks great, especially on mobile, congrats!

Comment by san4mus 1 day ago

I didn't know about this, thanks for sharing.

Comment by shevy-java 2 days ago

Someone at WIkipedia currently abuses visitors via nag-spam-harass pop-ups. Now, ublock origin hero-blocked this, but I feel that this is an abuse. I already had a similar "discussion" with Nate abusing KDE users via his donation-daemon but he keeps on wanting more and more money (https://web.archive.org/web/20250914213714/https://jriddell....; the original website entry was removed some months ago, for reasons unknown to me).

I feel that this is blatant abuse of people. The argument is NOT about as to whether donations should be acceptable or not, that is another discussion; the argument is that pester pop ups are an abuse of visitors. Same with pester daemons running in the background asking for money or possibly gathering user information in the future (age sniffing daemons).

Comment by sdan 2 days ago

nice! kind of similar but re-made a scrollable wikipedia a few weeks ago: https://quack.sdan.io/

Comment by octopus143 2 days ago

oh I have not see this one, looks good. I was inspired by wikitok project https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936723, I just did not like that it had random wikipedia articles, so I used HN as sort of a filter

Comment by TZubiri 2 days ago

5 stars, delved

Comment by beefmumbai 2 days ago

[flagged]

Comment by h4kunamata 2 days ago

Wikepedia, the most untrustworthy source ever, cases and cases of people who gained access to the article and completely changed it with fake information:

1. Assassin's Creed video game: A guy changed Japanese history by introducing a black samurai. The whole dramas was so bad that Janapense officials got involved, and one of the reasons Ubisoft Studio which was already broke due to DEI, went even more bankrupt.

2. A lawyer changed specific laws on Wikipedia and waited, as expected, judges were caught using the "fabricated law" against real cases with real consequences.

I could go on and on, but hey, you do you :)

Comment by protocolture 2 days ago

>1. Assassin's Creed video game: A guy changed Japanese history by introducing a black samurai. The whole dramas was so bad that Janapense officials got involved, and one of the reasons Ubisoft Studio which was already broke due to DEI, went even more bankrupt.

Honestly one of the best Wikipedia talk pages I had ever read, during the controversy. I read amazing arguments well put from both sides, but personally fell on the "Yes its fine to call him a samurai" side based on a very good argument about how the language was applied in that time period. But I felt I could strongly grasp the other sides argument too.

> A guy changed Japanese history by introducing a black samurai.

Playable character in Samurai Warriors 5.

Comment by altmanaltman 2 days ago

Wait, did people really get worked up over a playable character in a video game? How is Ubisoft changing history or whatever with this? Its a silly assasin game where you murder a lot of people?

Comment by protocolture 1 day ago

Yes they did. Not to mention its always been about a secret murder cult, and their enemy, people who use DNA to travel through time.

Any angle they can open a new front in the culture war with is enumerated immediately.

Comment by TZubiri 2 days ago

A technology that is used up to a million times a day is bad, here's the proof, two times it has failed:

Comment by glenstein 2 days ago

A tale as old as time. I don't just want to know the instances of harm, I want to know how representative they are supposed to be. And I think people who have thought through the latter question aren't the types to do the former.

Comment by TZubiri 2 days ago

In neither cases it was really a flaw of wikipedia, the model is clear, contributions should include content and sources, and it's the responsibility of the reader to check the reference.

I get it if bullshit is uploaded and a layman is fooled, but both cases involve trained professionals who know very damn well what a source is, judges and journalists, and it was principally their failure, not of Wikipedia.

Comment by glenstein 1 day ago

Exactly. If someone thinks this is a fatal flaw, they're kind of telling on themselves about the extent to which they check sources.

But also I think just as a fact of the matter Wiki is not frequently incorrect or manipulated (though there are exceptions). It's no coincidence that people who want to peddle misinformation are suddenly up in arms against Wikipedia's supposed bias.

Comment by tgv 2 days ago

Yeah, Wikipedia has some unreliable articles, but "the most untrustworthy source ever"? Whatever country you live in, I'm sure it has its share of Fox News, The Sun, or Bild Zeitung.

Comment by capitainenemo 2 days ago

I was wondering what the heck ① was all about and found this site in a search that seems to have a bone to pick with Thomas Lockley. https://japanese-with-naoto.com/2024/07/10/perfidious-histor... https://japanese-with-naoto.com/2024/05/29/disappointment-in...

First I've heard about this controversy, and I've never played the game, but I could see if a historian was a cite for something and they were saying different things in japanese and english, that the english wikipedia would end up citing inaccurate things.

There's been problems in the past with the deletionist faction on wikipedia or moderators abusing small fiefdoms - some of which has even ended up here on HN, but in this case, wikipedia just citing information from a supposedly reputable source seems to be wikipedia operating as intended.

Comment by hootz 2 days ago

Yeah, and all search engines can index a website with fake info to the top of the results for a question, so that makes search engines a terrible tool for looking up information. /s

Wikipedia never was a definitive or authoritative source on anything, that is by design, that is on the official guidelines. You can't cite Wikipedia on Wikipedia, you must provide sources for information, if no sources exist for an excerpt of an article then it must be tagged as citation needed.