This is cute, but the UI is uncannily not there (I think there were multiple attempts of designing the XP for web already which looked more authentic).
But my biggest gripe is, why represent it as a file system with WordPad displaying HTML? I get the idea for media, but not for the articles.
It's pretty obvious that Wikipedia should be a single CHM file. That would be nice and much more immersive.
This is really impressive. It's exactly what I imagined the original Microsoft Network in Windows 95 would have been like.
And so The Microsoft Network wasn't a program you loaded like CompuServe. It was part of the OS, with folder icons that looked just like real folders. It was a kind of version of the Web where you could browse online data the same way you browsed your file system. This is what made it cool.
It was as if the data was suddenly free of the shackles of being displayed in a program. Data wasn't just a web page, or a program showing its own internal databases. The Microsoft Network made it look like the data was right there, and you could click it and drag it around! For a brief time, back in 1995, it felt like we were on the verge of the true object-oriented web, a world filled with open data and free from the tyranny of the walled gardens.[1]
It also reminded me what an excellent job Wikipedia does with their hierarchical classification which you don't see when you're often only searching by article name.
Talk about data being separate from programs always reminds me what a good job Microsoft did with the spacial filesystem (that means one folder is one window, and they remember their location), single-document interface (a UI paradigm) and COM (a cross-process communication system). As a novice user not understanding a whole lot about the system, your documents were in the operating system and not in a specific program (this still wasn't perfect and a lot of new users did think their documents were in programs, which might be why we gave that up) and those programs could talk to each other and embed each other's documents.
This stuff probably seemed moderately innovative if you didn't grow up with it, seemed blindingly obvious if you did grow up with it, and somehow, like idiots, we've managed to lose it again!
Somehow this reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373 released by CERN on 30th anniversary. Pretty sure Berners-Lee in recent years was contributing to decentralized web/Internet concept that does also reminds a little bit of early WWW.
> This is really impressive. It's exactly what I imagined the original Microsoft Network in Windows 95 would have been like.
That's actually not far off. It was an old-fashioned BBS like Compuserve in a Windows Explorer-like window. The topic-specific icons you see in this mockup are actually very on-point, though on the Microsoft Network they would be for general BBS sections not encyclopedic articles or media.
> They had this project called Cairo that was supposed to throw out that scruffy old file-based filesystem and bring in a shiny new Object Based File System instead. It never happened, so we'll never know exactly how it might have turned out.
Nowadays we call those APIs. They are REST based rather than file-based to make them distributed, the main difference is that you don't get a common user interface that all providers adjust to; you need to choose your own client to read them and write into them.
And because they're created by programmers for programmers, they're not what you'd call user-friendly. Usually the only efficient way to use them is programmatically, so that you need to create a specific user interface for each API. Somehow, I doubt that Cairo would have come to be anything much different from that in the end.
Incredibly beautiful, possibly because it maps so well to the mental model we typically use to organize knowledge in our heads. I don't know how we lost the folder/container vs. document/content iconography, and other things (like layout of items, sorting) during the shift to web applications.
Knowledge doesn’t neatly align to a nested hierarchy. Especially written knowledge.
Language is an imperfect means to convey knowledge, and people store that knowledge in subjective and highly personal ways.
You may mentally recall balloons within “entertainment” or “party”, whereas I might store that knowledge under “horror”.
Add onto that the massive focus on using graph theory to scale social networking technologically, and you effectively lose any motivation for rigid hierarchy.
A folder system doesn't have to be strictly rigid, you can still have "symlinks" so the same article appearing in different folders (aka labels if you can easily duplicate content inside folders, but you retain the nested, drill-down approach)
Wikimedia Commons has this feature. Editors can manually bless certain combinations of traits as "subcategories".
For example, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Paintings_of_cas... contains the subcategories "Paintings of castles by country" (nested hierarchy), "Frescos of castles" (a medium), "Paintings of Château de Chillon" (a subject), and "Young Knight in a Landscape by Carpaccio" (multiple views onto a specific item). Each item may appear in multiple subcategories. As far as I can tell, the UI won't let you search for frescos of Italian castles (unless somebody's made a subcategory for that), or view all paintings of castles regardless of their subcategory.
I'm not very fond of this approach. I'd prefer for each item to have an unstructured set of tags ("fresco", "depiction of a castle", "depiction of Italy"), with automatic derivation of parent tags ("fresco" implies "painting") and the option to search by multiple tags. It should be possible to automatically discover tags which best refine a search, so that the UI can still suggest them to the user, as it does today.
> I'd prefer for each item to have an unstructured set of tags ("fresco", "depiction of a castle", "depiction of Italy"), with automatic derivation of parent tags ("fresco" implies "painting") and the option to search by multiple tags.
It's definitely possible to do this. IMSLP (a large repository of freely available sheet music, which differs by cross-cutting features such as genre, historical period, contributors (composers and others), instrumentation etc.) is MediaWiki based and has a plugin that does exactly that. These days the would probably want to host all the tags on Wikidata so that they can be multilingual and queryable out of the box, though.
Which is actually done on commons, it just isn't very popular (on images, click the structured data tab and then look at depicts) [admittedly i think a big part of the problem is is implementation choices and UI decisions].
That's only "depicts" claims and is nowhere near comprehensive. It doesn't even come close to matching what's currently stated using categories. Running searches on that data is also hard compared to what IMSLP gives you for their own system.
I agree, for some reason I have always alternated between wanting not just the universal search box but a browsable hierarchy to mentally run my fingers over and discover in a structured way.
We let go of the the manual index somewhere along the way since it doesn’t scale like search, obviously, but for the same reason I keep a library and enjoy traversing others’ private ones and visiting public ones, I keep coming back to browse.
Large scrollbars! Windows with borders! What a relief!
This has become a forgotten art: we focus so much on CONTENT these days that we forget that people want to use the mouse to scroll, and use the mouse to resize windows.
This is genuinely a really fun way to browse Wikipedia. Only drawback is that folder names that contain ellipsis don't show the full name when clicked.
It is nice. I randomly click on something interest just appear in my mind and lead to this: life -> death -> last_words -> More milk. But I can't find it on Wiki. I search More milk. and the first result is this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Michael_Jackson. Hmm, why is the name different?
> After several hours and several drug injections, Jackson was still unable to fall asleep, and, according to Murray, was repeatedly asking him for "milk", a nickname for the powerful surgical general anesthetic propofol, which Jackson had used in the past as a sleep aid. At 10:40 a.m., with Jackson still not asleep, Murray relented to his requests and injected him with 25 milligrams of propofol diluted with lidocaine. With Jackson finally asleep, Murray testified that he left his bedside to go to the bathroom, and after returning two minutes later, discovered that Jackson was not breathing and had a weak pulse.
Not sure why they downvoted you because you have a point - icons are not the same as Windows XP's, wallpaper flat color reminds me more of Win 95/98 and the taskbar design has some details that do not match precisely with Windows XP's. I'd also bet it's due to copyright concerns
Ok this is a genuinely perfect way to research an entire field by article instead of having to jump recursively link to link and forgetting what you were doing 5 minutes ago.
I've never seen wikipedia from this categorized vantage point. If we're being real their UX is kinda crap outside the usual search->article->link flow and could use a complete rework.
3: the tree style tabs plugin in combination with middle-click is criminally underrated for navigating hierarchical data. (middleclick open-in-new-tab is only mildly handy, tree style tabs seems tepid by itself without it)
TIL, I think I've landed on these pages a decent number of times but never from wikipedia's internal nav. I assumed they were more of an adhoc occasional thing, not a standard for sorting all pages.
Somehow the format makes me feel like its easier to learn here than the intimidating encyclopedia theme of wikipedia. It's interesting to consider the effect that presentation of information might have on learning. We know that physical books are said to be better for learning (I have heard people go up by an entire grade if they use them), but maybe there is something to be said for themes, too.
This is cute, but the UI is uncannily not there (I think there were multiple attempts of designing the XP for web already which looked more authentic).
But my biggest gripe is, why represent it as a file system with WordPad displaying HTML? I get the idea for media, but not for the articles.
It's pretty obvious that Wikipedia should be a single CHM file. That would be nice and much more immersive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help
This is really impressive. It's exactly what I imagined the original Microsoft Network in Windows 95 would have been like.
And so The Microsoft Network wasn't a program you loaded like CompuServe. It was part of the OS, with folder icons that looked just like real folders. It was a kind of version of the Web where you could browse online data the same way you browsed your file system. This is what made it cool.
It was as if the data was suddenly free of the shackles of being displayed in a program. Data wasn't just a web page, or a program showing its own internal databases. The Microsoft Network made it look like the data was right there, and you could click it and drag it around! For a brief time, back in 1995, it felt like we were on the verge of the true object-oriented web, a world filled with open data and free from the tyranny of the walled gardens.[1]
It also reminded me what an excellent job Wikipedia does with their hierarchical classification which you don't see when you're often only searching by article name.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260129143542/https://www.coder...
Talk about data being separate from programs always reminds me what a good job Microsoft did with the spacial filesystem (that means one folder is one window, and they remember their location), single-document interface (a UI paradigm) and COM (a cross-process communication system). As a novice user not understanding a whole lot about the system, your documents were in the operating system and not in a specific program (this still wasn't perfect and a lot of new users did think their documents were in programs, which might be why we gave that up) and those programs could talk to each other and embed each other's documents.
This stuff probably seemed moderately innovative if you didn't grow up with it, seemed blindingly obvious if you did grow up with it, and somehow, like idiots, we've managed to lose it again!
Somehow this reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373 released by CERN on 30th anniversary. Pretty sure Berners-Lee in recent years was contributing to decentralized web/Internet concept that does also reminds a little bit of early WWW.
There was also this submission from 9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13361523 - and probably not the only one of such ideas
> This is really impressive. It's exactly what I imagined the original Microsoft Network in Windows 95 would have been like.
That's actually not far off. It was an old-fashioned BBS like Compuserve in a Windows Explorer-like window. The topic-specific icons you see in this mockup are actually very on-point, though on the Microsoft Network they would be for general BBS sections not encyclopedic articles or media.
> They had this project called Cairo that was supposed to throw out that scruffy old file-based filesystem and bring in a shiny new Object Based File System instead. It never happened, so we'll never know exactly how it might have turned out.
Nowadays we call those APIs. They are REST based rather than file-based to make them distributed, the main difference is that you don't get a common user interface that all providers adjust to; you need to choose your own client to read them and write into them.
And because they're created by programmers for programmers, they're not what you'd call user-friendly. Usually the only efficient way to use them is programmatically, so that you need to create a specific user interface for each API. Somehow, I doubt that Cairo would have come to be anything much different from that in the end.
That really sounds like the idea behind Plan9. Interesting.
Incredibly beautiful, possibly because it maps so well to the mental model we typically use to organize knowledge in our heads. I don't know how we lost the folder/container vs. document/content iconography, and other things (like layout of items, sorting) during the shift to web applications.
Knowledge doesn’t neatly align to a nested hierarchy. Especially written knowledge.
Language is an imperfect means to convey knowledge, and people store that knowledge in subjective and highly personal ways.
You may mentally recall balloons within “entertainment” or “party”, whereas I might store that knowledge under “horror”.
Add onto that the massive focus on using graph theory to scale social networking technologically, and you effectively lose any motivation for rigid hierarchy.
> Knowledge doesn’t neatly align to a nested hierarchy. Especially written knowledge.
The category tree being displayed comes directly fron wikipedia. E.g. Wikipedia has pages like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Art
A folder system doesn't have to be strictly rigid, you can still have "symlinks" so the same article appearing in different folders (aka labels if you can easily duplicate content inside folders, but you retain the nested, drill-down approach)
Wikimedia Commons has this feature. Editors can manually bless certain combinations of traits as "subcategories".
For example, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Paintings_of_cas... contains the subcategories "Paintings of castles by country" (nested hierarchy), "Frescos of castles" (a medium), "Paintings of Château de Chillon" (a subject), and "Young Knight in a Landscape by Carpaccio" (multiple views onto a specific item). Each item may appear in multiple subcategories. As far as I can tell, the UI won't let you search for frescos of Italian castles (unless somebody's made a subcategory for that), or view all paintings of castles regardless of their subcategory.
I'm not very fond of this approach. I'd prefer for each item to have an unstructured set of tags ("fresco", "depiction of a castle", "depiction of Italy"), with automatic derivation of parent tags ("fresco" implies "painting") and the option to search by multiple tags. It should be possible to automatically discover tags which best refine a search, so that the UI can still suggest them to the user, as it does today.
> I'd prefer for each item to have an unstructured set of tags ("fresco", "depiction of a castle", "depiction of Italy"), with automatic derivation of parent tags ("fresco" implies "painting") and the option to search by multiple tags.
It's definitely possible to do this. IMSLP (a large repository of freely available sheet music, which differs by cross-cutting features such as genre, historical period, contributors (composers and others), instrumentation etc.) is MediaWiki based and has a plugin that does exactly that. These days the would probably want to host all the tags on Wikidata so that they can be multilingual and queryable out of the box, though.
Which is actually done on commons, it just isn't very popular (on images, click the structured data tab and then look at depicts) [admittedly i think a big part of the problem is is implementation choices and UI decisions].
That's only "depicts" claims and is nowhere near comprehensive. It doesn't even come close to matching what's currently stated using categories. Running searches on that data is also hard compared to what IMSLP gives you for their own system.
Yes, and it sad the search in this UI doesn’t work…
I agree, for some reason I have always alternated between wanting not just the universal search box but a browsable hierarchy to mentally run my fingers over and discover in a structured way.
We let go of the the manual index somewhere along the way since it doesn’t scale like search, obviously, but for the same reason I keep a library and enjoy traversing others’ private ones and visiting public ones, I keep coming back to browse.
This is why I frequently post about how I miss Gopher. It kind of forced this hierarchy.
I guess this model doesn't maximize engagement
I dunno, I never had a "Sheep Looking at Viewer" category in my mental model until I randomly clicked around the media folder.
I feel like the 100 or so uncategorized articles should lie either directly in home or clutter the desktop for a more authentic experience.
The shininess looks a bit more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_Media_Center_Editio... and not like the regular Windows XP, but still a fun project!
Definitely not MCE: the title bars are bright blue with the "Fisher-Price" orange buttons, which was the hallmark of regular XP.
Yeah it's def going for an XP clone feel. Although it's not 1:1, I assume to skirt copyright.
Large scrollbars! Windows with borders! What a relief!
This has become a forgotten art: we focus so much on CONTENT these days that we forget that people want to use the mouse to scroll, and use the mouse to resize windows.
Hm. It is a clear UI, but I would prefer more space for the content.
It’s too snappy for a windows xp experience.
I did something similar for my personal site :)
https://brynnbateman.com/
what tech stack does it uses?
This is genuinely a really fun way to browse Wikipedia. Only drawback is that folder names that contain ellipsis don't show the full name when clicked.
If you click on the tile icon at the top of the window, you can have it display as a list!
Where does the hierarchical classification come from?
Wikipedia category namespace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles
Beautiful memories of browsing random topics in Microsoft Encarta '97
It is nice. I randomly click on something interest just appear in my mind and lead to this: life -> death -> last_words -> More milk. But I can't find it on Wiki. I search More milk. and the first result is this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Michael_Jackson. Hmm, why is the name different?
"More milk" is a redirect to that page
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=More_milk.&redire...
The "Windows XP" website displays the same article when you click on "More milk" there
Wow, do you know what is the relationship between More milk and the death of MJ?
The Wikipedia article does:
> After several hours and several drug injections, Jackson was still unable to fall asleep, and, according to Murray, was repeatedly asking him for "milk", a nickname for the powerful surgical general anesthetic propofol, which Jackson had used in the past as a sleep aid. At 10:40 a.m., with Jackson still not asleep, Murray relented to his requests and injected him with 25 milligrams of propofol diluted with lidocaine. With Jackson finally asleep, Murray testified that he left his bedside to go to the bathroom, and after returning two minutes later, discovered that Jackson was not breathing and had a weak pulse.
Thanks! TIL that Propofol has a nickname "Milk of amnesia". MJ asked more milk which meant more propofol.
Here's Robin Williams describing it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOIBBE3ObRY
He calls taking propofol for sleep as Having chemotherapy because you're tired of shaving your head
It's funny, haha. Thank you for the link!
Oh wow, to me the history section feels like Civilopedia (in a good way). I can't explain why.
make it look like encarta 95 and you'll have a REAL winner on your hands
This is so Cool! Great concepts and execution. I could imagine this way of interaction and exploration apply to Educational area
Is there a reason why it looks like Temu's Windows XP? Copyright concerns I guess?
Ask LLM to make a 98/XP styled website and you will discover the reason.
Not sure why they downvoted you because you have a point - icons are not the same as Windows XP's, wallpaper flat color reminds me more of Win 95/98 and the taskbar design has some details that do not match precisely with Windows XP's. I'd also bet it's due to copyright concerns
Probably cos it's vibe coded?
The main CSS comes from XP.css [0], but the AI additions [1] have definitely messed it up in some way.
The whole thing is pure JS which is nice but the comments give a good impression isn't not hand written IMO [2]
[0]: https://github.com/botoxparty/XP.css/
[1]: https://explorer.samismith.com/css/base.css
[2]: https://explorer.samismith.com/js/explorer.js
Because it's obviously vibe coded (look at the source code).
love how it loads instantly and feels smooth. imo useless but still cool
> love how it loads instantly and feels smooth.
Unlike Wikipedia these days.
wikipedia is fine, and you can still use vector or even monobook skins. try adding ?useskin=monobook at the end of the url
Is this sarcasm? Doesn't Wikipedia look identical to 10 years ago and still load instantly?
Yes. It definitely lacks the hourglass mouse cursor experience!
I guess XP (x64) could run like this on modern PCs.
pretty cool! needs the search function to work tho to be useful
this needs to be an offline bootable usb version :)
This looks really cool. feels nostalgic. it would be more fun if it can be switched into whatever desktop mode i want like unix.
What a beautiful nostalgic feeling. Keep up the good work! Worth adding some start menu options as well.
Such a cool project! Now it's just missing search and a request for donations
It's also missing the defrag tool. Without it, it's going to be very slow as the disk fills up.
Should put a shortcut to it on the desktop as well, so that users who experience significant lag can defrag at will.
Seeing the Windows XP theme I loved the most really brings back a wave of nostalgia
trying to find what folder has Дэбі робіць Даляс
Presumably none, since its only searching english wikipedia, and that looks to be belarusian.
Thanks! This is great.
This is just beautiful. I wonder if this could turn into different styles, like that of a book, or a cabinet?
Super nice. Congrats
Ok this is a genuinely perfect way to research an entire field by article instead of having to jump recursively link to link and forgetting what you were doing 5 minutes ago.
I've never seen wikipedia from this categorized vantage point. If we're being real their UX is kinda crap outside the usual search->article->link flow and could use a complete rework.
Lucky 10000?
Three tricks if you didn't already know:
1: you'll find categories at the bottom of regular mediawiki pages
2: if you click one, you'll end up on a page like eg. this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computers
3: the tree style tabs plugin in combination with middle-click is criminally underrated for navigating hierarchical data. (middleclick open-in-new-tab is only mildly handy, tree style tabs seems tepid by itself without it)
TIL, I think I've landed on these pages a decent number of times but never from wikipedia's internal nav. I assumed they were more of an adhoc occasional thing, not a standard for sorting all pages.
Somehow the format makes me feel like its easier to learn here than the intimidating encyclopedia theme of wikipedia. It's interesting to consider the effect that presentation of information might have on learning. We know that physical books are said to be better for learning (I have heard people go up by an entire grade if they use them), but maybe there is something to be said for themes, too.
I guess appearance is subjective because I always considered XP to be the ugliest Windows ever released.
Well, it should also have Solitaire and Minesweeper. :)
I'd like to see a gource interface to Wikipedia, personally ..
Amazing work!
This is actually so cool
Is there a way to go up/back a folder without clicks? Enter key goes into folders.
Very cool!
I love it! Congrats !