Are you a Tiktok fan and Scroll infinite but also of Wikipedia? In recent days, The developer of apps Isaac Gemal launched Wikitok, a version of the encyclopedia on-line Inspired by the most popular Chinese platform. Its design is designed so that users can navigate the different articles using the interface that has made the Bytedance social network famous.
In this way, it is possible to learn new things and read interesting news in a completely new way that is fun and relaxing. Wikitok is a wink to the social networks that we use daily, but without the ghost of an algorithm that decides what content the users will see and which are not.
How does Wikitok work?
Available through application stores and on the web, Wikitok offers visitors a random list of Wikipedia items in a vertical displacement interface. However, despite the fact that the name makes a clear reference to Tiktok, the site does not present any video content, it is limited to presenting the entries of the encyclopedia accompanied by an image, offering users the possibility of linking to the page Wikipedia officer just by clicking on “Read more.”
At the moment, the presentation of the entries to the Feed They are randomHowever, users have already made specific requests to Gemal in the hope of being able to show entries based on their interests. “Many people have sent me messages and even open issues in my github asking for an algorithm for wikitok,” explains the developer to the portal Ars Technica. He adds that his intention is not that his app be governed by “ruthless and opaque algorithms”: “Why can’t we have a small corner of the world without them?”
Arstechnica
The project began as a rumor
The amazing is not so much its operation or its interface, but the idea itself. It all started at the beginning of last week, when developer Tyler Angert coined the term wikitok, launching a real challenge to his colleagues in X: “Crazy project idea: all wikipedia on a movable page”. From mouth to mouth, the idea reached Gemal’s ears, which immediately got to work to make the project come true. And so, after a few hours, and thanks to the use of AI tools: Claude and cursor of Anthropic, the developer was able to launch its own version of Wikitok, immediately attracting the interest of the public.
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“The entire project consists of about hundreds of lines of code, mostly written by Claude,” explains Gemal. He explains that artificial intelligence helped him work quickly and to give good use to the viral tweet of Angert that asked for a version of Wikipedia with vertical displacement. Wikitok is available in Github, so anyone can edit or contribute to the project. The idea is to optimize the functioning of the site, but without giving in an algorithm: “I have no great plans for a kind of crazy Tiktok algorithm. In any case, it is an antialgorithm.”
Article originally published in Wired Italy. Adapted by Alondra Flores.
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