Try one
- Krakatoa — the volcano that was heard three thousand miles away
- Sunda Strait — the water it blew apart, between Java and Sumatra
- Panaitan — an island in that strait, emptied by the wave
Start from a subject, not a place
Type Napoleon and the globe fills with thirty-one places, grouped by the part of his life each one belongs to: Early life holds Brienne-le-Château and Autun, the schools; Early career holds Alexandria, Acre and Arcole; Ruler of France holds fourteen battlefields from Corunna to Leipzig; Reforms holds the Bank of France and the harbour at Cherbourg.
Napoleon himself has no coordinates — a person does not sit anywhere. What sits somewhere are the places a life touched, and that is what you get to see.
This is the thing no map does and no encyclopaedia does. Wikipedia knows where places are, and it knows what an article links to; it just never shows you both at once.
How it works
Open a place on the globe — from a base you dropped, from a subject you searched, or from a trail somebody sent you. Next to the button that takes you to Wikipedia there is a second one: rabbit hole. It asks Wikipedia what that article links to, keeps everything that has coordinates, and puts it on the map and in a list beside it.
The list is grouped by the section of the article each place comes from, in the order the article puts them — which, for anything historical, is also the order things happened. So you do not have to be told why somewhere is on the list: you can see that Sunda Strait comes from the opening, and that Rodrigues — an island nearly five thousand kilometres away — comes from Historical significance, which is the section about how far the 1883 eruption was heard.
Pick one and the globe flies there. The trail you have walked stays along the top, so you can see where you came from and step back to any point of it. Everything you have already visited is dropped from the next set of choices — that is what makes it a path instead of a bounce between two articles.
The trail is a link
Nothing is stored and there is no account. Your trail lives inside its own address —
/app/?hole=Q82613-Q192790-Q1861129 — so sending somebody the path you walked is
just sending them a link. It opens on their globe at your last stop, with your steps behind
it, and they carry on from there.
The identifiers are Wikidata's rather than article titles, because a page can be renamed and an identifier cannot. A trail from a year ago still opens.
What it will not do
- Only what can be put on a map. An article has to carry coordinates to appear, and about one in ten does — a typical page offers between ten and forty places out of the two hundred things it mentions. Ideas, people and events without a location are not there. They can still be where you start: only the steps have to be places.
- Only what the article actually says. Wikipedia attaches navigation boxes to the foot of most pages — «Volcanoes of Indonesia», «Islands of the Sunda Strait» — and those links are not the article talking. Krakatoa carries 174 places that way and mentions 28. You get the 28.
- Big articles sink. «Belgium» and «Brussels» are linked from half of Europe, and near the top they would take every click and make each hop look like the last one. Anything past about a hundred and fifty thousand characters goes to the bottom of the list instead of disappearing — if you want it, it is there.
- It reads Wikipedia live. Nothing is cached on our side, so what you see is what the article says today, and a page with no outgoing links that go anywhere is a dead end.
Where to start one
Two doors into the same room. Open the globe and press Rabbit hole to type a subject — a person, a war, a volcano — or centre somewhere you are curious about, press Explore here, and open any of the places that light up. From there it is the same gesture over and over: read, pick, fly, read.