Wikiverse lets you explore Wikipedia like a human spaceship

Anyone who has spent any serious time on the internet has fallen down a Wikipedia hole, idly clicking linked sources and the site's "random article" option for hours at a time, accidentally learning about everything from Ghanian sprinters to goatfish. These sessions are illuminating, but I find myself snapping back to reality after an hour with no idea how I got to my last entry. Wikiverse could help solve that problem. The site casts Wikipedia's pages as floating points of light in a 3D universe, clustering "stars" on the same topic — technology, society, music, etcetera — together. Click on a star and you can read its entry, as well as see the pages it links to, stretching across the universe as colored lines.

Zooming in on a cluster gives me a head rush

It's an abstract reinvention of Wikipedia's knowledge banks, but it's surprisingly useful to couch the site's billions of articles in a more visual form, showing the links between art, science, history, and other major topics. As well as being visually pretty, Wikiverse also shows just how much information Wikipedia holds — even when loading just five percent of the site's contents, zooming in on a cluster gives me the same head rush I get when I think about just how many stars are in our real galaxy.

The Verge's own star — shown above — links to Wikipedia pages for Time magazine, Engadget, and the New York Times, as well as more esoteric concepts like consumer electronics, podcasts, and the position of editor-in-chief, situated on the other side of the Wikiverse. Closer to home, our star is surrounded by other tech publications, but also, somewhat inexplicably, the entries for Pantera, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, and a whole bunch of emo bands. For anyone who's been playing No Man's Sky recently, it'll be a familiar way for you to explore the site's vast tracts of information, and for everyone else, it's now even easier to get sucked into a Wikipedia (black) hole.