Language is an imperfect means to convey knowledge, and people store that knowledge in subjective and highly personal ways.
You may mentally recall balloons within “entertainment” or “party”, whereas I might store that knowledge under “horror”.
Add onto that the massive focus on using graph theory to scale social networking technologically, and you effectively lose any motivation for rigid hierarchy.
For example, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Paintings_of_cas... contains the subcategories "Paintings of castles by country" (nested hierarchy), "Frescos of castles" (a medium), "Paintings of Château de Chillon" (a subject), and "Young Knight in a Landscape by Carpaccio" (multiple views onto a specific item). Each item may appear in multiple subcategories. As far as I can tell, the UI won't let you search for frescos of Italian castles (unless somebody's made a subcategory for that), or view all paintings of castles regardless of their subcategory.
I'm not very fond of this approach. I'd prefer for each item to have an unstructured set of tags ("fresco", "depiction of a castle", "depiction of Italy"), with automatic derivation of parent tags ("fresco" implies "painting") and the option to search by multiple tags. It should be possible to automatically discover tags which best refine a search, so that the UI can still suggest them to the user, as it does today.
The category tree being displayed comes directly fron wikipedia. E.g. Wikipedia has pages like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Art
We let go of the the manual index somewhere along the way since it doesn’t scale like search, obviously, but for the same reason I keep a library and enjoy traversing others’ private ones and visiting public ones, I keep coming back to browse.
And so The Microsoft Network wasn't a program you loaded like CompuServe. It was part of the OS, with folder icons that looked just like real folders. It was a kind of version of the Web where you could browse online data the same way you browsed your file system. This is what made it cool.
It was as if the data was suddenly free of the shackles of being displayed in a program. Data wasn't just a web page, or a program showing its own internal databases. The Microsoft Network made it look like the data was right there, and you could click it and drag it around! For a brief time, back in 1995, it felt like we were on the verge of the true object-oriented web, a world filled with open data and free from the tyranny of the walled gardens.[1]
It also reminded me what an excellent job Wikipedia does with their hierarchical classification which you don't see when you're often only searching by article name.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260129143542/https://www.coder...
This stuff probably seemed moderately innovative if you didn't grow up with it, seemed blindingly obvious if you did grow up with it, and somehow, like idiots, we've managed to lose it again!
To this day there exist office workers—ones old enough that no, it's not because the were introduced to computers via smartphones—who use a computer for hours every single weekday day but get totally turned around in a file manager, and don't know even the extreme basics like how to copy and move files.
There are offices full of such folks, in non-tech offices, where the person who knows how to sort-of use a GUI file manager is the "computer whiz" they go to with questions.
As someone who once tried to use that supposedly hierarchical classification for data organization, it is unfortunately not excellent at all.
It is rather arbitrary, inconsistent, extremely incomplete, and not infrequently circular. Think of it more like a bunch of haphazardly applied tags that make perfect sense in the context of a single page, but quite frequently make very little sense when you look at the actual pages and sub categories that belong to a category. Category membership is just not something visible enough for it to wind up being organized and curated in any kind of systematically accurate way.
On the other hand, the presence of an infobox of a certain type is extremely reliable for categorizing many types of articles.
Nowadays we call those APIs. They are REST based rather than file-based to make them distributed, the main difference is that you don't get a common user interface that all providers adjust to; you need to choose your own client to read them and write into them.
And because they're created by programmers for programmers, they're not what you'd call user-friendly. Usually the only efficient way to use them is programmatically, so that you need to create a specific user interface for each API. Somehow, I doubt that Cairo would have come to be anything much different from that in the end.
There was also this submission from 9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13361523 - and probably not the only one of such ideas
It seems a bit of a missed opportunity really. If they had more agressively pursued alliances, it could potentially have been a solid (pun only semi intended) foundation for Mastadon and Bluesky.
The name is unfortunate as well, it is really difficult to search for.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_pr...
That's actually not far off. It was an old-fashioned BBS like Compuserve in a Windows Explorer-like window. The topic-specific icons you see in this mockup are actually very on-point, though on the Microsoft Network they would be for general BBS sections not encyclopedic articles or media.
Unlike Wikipedia these days.
The main CSS comes from XP.css [0], but the AI additions [1] have definitely messed it up in some way.
The whole thing is pure JS which is nice but the comments give a good impression isn't not hand written IMO [2]
[0]: https://github.com/botoxparty/XP.css/
I've never seen wikipedia from this categorized vantage point. If we're being real their UX is kinda crap outside the usual search->article->link flow and could use a complete rework.
Three tricks if you didn't already know:
1: you'll find categories at the bottom of regular mediawiki pages
2: if you click one, you'll end up on a page like eg. this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computers
3: the tree style tabs plugin in combination with middle-click is criminally underrated for navigating hierarchical data. (middleclick open-in-new-tab is only mildly handy, tree style tabs seems tepid by itself without it)
The little arrows next to the subcategories can be clicked to open up trees, so you have hierarchical data in there as well. Try click open eg Classes of Computers (With 41 direct subcategories, and 91 pages directly in the top level category, that's a big tree!)
Categories are criminally under-used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=More_milk.&redire...
The "Windows XP" website displays the same article when you click on "More milk" there
> After several hours and several drug injections, Jackson was still unable to fall asleep, and, according to Murray, was repeatedly asking him for "milk", a nickname for the powerful surgical general anesthetic propofol, which Jackson had used in the past as a sleep aid. At 10:40 a.m., with Jackson still not asleep, Murray relented to his requests and injected him with 25 milligrams of propofol diluted with lidocaine. With Jackson finally asleep, Murray testified that he left his bedside to go to the bathroom, and after returning two minutes later, discovered that Jackson was not breathing and had a weak pulse.
This has become a forgotten art: we focus so much on CONTENT these days that we forget that people want to use the mouse to scroll, and use the mouse to resize windows.
But my biggest gripe is, why represent it as a file system with WordPad displaying HTML? I get the idea for media, but not for the articles.
It's pretty obvious that Wikipedia should be a single CHM file. That would be nice and much more immersive.
Should put a shortcut to it on the desktop as well, so that users who experience significant lag can defrag at will.
