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Wikipedia Category Graph Generator (3,194 views)

I was in the process of trying to understand the classification schemes available in Wikipedia (categories, lists and navigation maps) when I came across this nifty tool. It is very useful to understand the inter-relationships between Wikipedia categories.

You can check it out here: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~dapete/catgraph/

Tags: categories, graph, wikipedia

"Wikipedia Category Graph Generator" was published on November 12th, 2007 and is listed in wikipedia.

Comments on "Wikipedia Category Graph Generator": 4 Comments

David Gerard wrote,

The important thing to remember about the en:wp category scheme is that it doesn’t necessarily make sense, and there’s no reason or authority to make it make sense. This is unfortunate …

There is talk of a more tag-like scheme for categorisation, where most subcategories would disappear to be replaced by a query on the intersection of two tags. But someone has to write the code, and show it won’t slow the database to a crawl in practice.

Link | November 12th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
prashanthellina wrote,

David, I agree with you about Wikipedia article classfication being incorrect in some cases. However, I believe the data is still useful for semantic analysis experiments.

Link | November 13th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
Josh Saxe wrote,

It seems the category graph generator no longer works =(

Link | January 22nd, 2010 at 8:31 am
Josh Saxe wrote,

Sorry, spoke too soon. With the default link type my searches were returning an empty graph. I had to switch the link type to ‘article category’ and then I started getting fairly large structures. Also the cloud graph layout (alternative algorithm checkbox) tended to work better for me, as the default tree-style layout generated very wide graphs. Here’s an interesting looking graph:
http://toolserver.org/~dapete/catgraph/graph.php?wiki=wikipedia&lang=en&cat=Oliver+Cromwell&d=0&n=0&format=png&links=0&sub=article&fdp=1

Link | January 22nd, 2010 at 8:40 am