Posts tagged ‘wikipedia’

8 Open Source Websites I Use, and 2 I Don’t

September 5, 2009, 2:25 pm

I love lists, and I love open source software. Whats more I find that I am using more and more open source websites in my daily life. Without further ado here are 8 open source websites I use:

#
 Site
 Comment
 Source
1 Wikipedia Great free encyclopedia Source
2 Reddit Social news site, similar to digg. Source
3 Planet Ubuntu Ok well I mostly just use the rss feeds. Source
4 earobinson.org That was a bit of a shameless plug but really any wordpress blog would do. Source
5 Identi.ca micro-blogging service similar to twitter. Source
6 Trac Great project management tool! Source
7 Launchpad Another great project management tool, used by the ubuntu community and many more. Source
8 Pastebin Great way to share snippets of text Source



and two that I don’t:

#
 Site
 Comment
 Source
1 Drupal Like Wordpress another great CMS Source
2 Libre.fm The open source version of Last.Fm a great music tracking service Source



Update: I just realized I also use tr.im as my url shortener and they will be going open source.

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Category: Open Source  |  Comment

Mapping Wikipedia

April 27, 2008, 6:04 pm

I was reading reddit the other day and stumbled upon the fact that wikipedia has an API. Neat I thought, and having some free time since my exams are now over I figured I would play around a bit with it. When I browse wikipedia I often click from link to link, and have come to the conclusion that all articles are 6 degrees of separation. For example I can go from Ubuntu to Tesco to Japan to G8 to United States to George W. Bush bet you never knew Ubuntu was connected to George W. Bush. I once wrote a map of the internet program that people seemed to like to download and modify so in that spirit I wrote wikimap.py to map wikipedia. wikimap.py Requires pygraphviz (Install using sudo aptitude install python-pygraphviz). To use the program simply run the program and give it the wiki page name for example “python wikimap.py Norman_Graham” Note that Ubuntu is Ubuntu_(Linux_distribution) and you can find the full name in the address bar of your browser. For more complicated maps use wikimap.py –help for full usage info.

Here are a few examples that I created with wikimap.py


And a really large one being viewed in inkscape.

More examples including the dot files can be found at http://www.files.earobinson.org/wiki/. But there are a few features I would like to add:

  1. Generating the graph using python-pygraphviz currently takes a really long time and I would like to be able to do it faster
  2. Page links currently include templates, I would like to only use links in the body of the text
  3. It would be nice if the software cached previously seen connections. (But then I need to detect updates to that page)

If anyone has a nice simple soultion to any of those problems leave a comment. Also if you are able to generate any neat images I would love to see them.

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Category: Projects, Python  |  12 Comments