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2023-06-22 | #gemipedia | @Acidus
I love getting feedback on the things I make. It absolutely makes my day. It's also a steady source of suggestions on how to improve things. Yesterday I got an email from Santiago asking to add a "Random Article" function to Gemipedia to use for discovery. This will redirect you to random articles on Wikipedia.
So when I went to add a `GetRandomArticle()` method to our Wikipedia API client, I was surprised to find it already existed! Turns out, I had added this functionality last year without directly exposing it to the user and I had completely forgotten! I used it to stress test my Wikipedia HTML parser. Wikipedia is full of gross HTML (Table's used to create 2 column layouts, etc.). As I added support for things like math formulas, geolocation links, infoboxes, I wanted to make sure they worked, or at the very least, didn't cause a crash. The solution? Make a simple loop that like this:
do {
string name = "";
try {
Article article = GetRandomArticle();
name = article.Name;
Gemipedia.Render(article);
} catch(Exception ex) {
Console.WriteLine($"Error {name}. Threw exception: {ex.Message}");
}
} while(true);
I let this run through a hundred thousand or so random articles, collecting errors and fixing them, and I had a fairly robust HTML-to-gemtext system.
Since I already had the API stubbed out, I simply added a "View Random Article" link to the homepage of Gemipedia! Here you go:
Santiago told me they wanted the Random Article feature because they liked just discovering interesting content on Wikipedia. I should add that Gemipedia supports Wikipedia's Featured Article from the front page of Wikipedia. Featured Articles are a special designation that only the best, most complete, and well written article receive. Only about 0.09% of all articles in the English Wikipedia are featured articles. Even if it's a topic you have never heard of, it will be well rounded and engaging content. So this is a great way to find interesting content.
Wikipedia also lists the most read articles for that day. Personally I use this as kind of a crowd-sourced filter to see what the current topics are in the zeitgeist without having to actual read the news site. Gemipedia makes this available too.
Drop me an email. I makes my day to get emails, and its where I find some of the latest ideas.
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