viz.

The good folks over at Information Aesthetics recently posted a link to Wiki Mind Map. The site provides a mind-map-style outline of topics in Wikipedia.

Right now the site appears to be able to search the German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan, and Indonesian versions of the encyclopedia. It can also search www.self-qs.de, which appears to be some sort of German dictionary (perhaps a German-speaker can help out here).

A few thoughts about this tool jumped out at me immediately: first, it seems like an excellent way for students (and everyone else who uses Wikipedia) to find related topics for a search term. Additionally, it allows visual thinkers to search the Wikipedia knowledge-base without having to read a bunch of annoying text.

However, I'm not sure that the mind map metaphor is the best one for this task. The searches I have done never go beyond the second-level in the hierarchy, making me wonder what purpose the hierarchy serves. Even if the engine was able to add deeper levels of results, I wonder if a simple clustering structure would be better for the presentation. It is unlikely that the deeper levels would be very well ordered, and the clustering method wouldn’t imply the kind of regimented outline that is the basis of the mindmap. If someone could put this same functionality into an interface like Visual Thesaurus and have it search through a couple layers of pages, the tool would be much more handy.