Show HN: Wikigraph – an interactive visualization of all of English Wikipedia(tobypenner.com)
tobypenner.com
Show HN: Wikigraph – an interactive visualization of all of English Wikipedia
https://tobypenner.com/wikigraph/
2 comments
I was dragging to rotate it before I realized that it was 2D...
Are there really two principal components or is that primarily your choice of visualization?
Are there really two principal components or is that primarily your choice of visualization?
It's a choice. The layout isn't PCA, it's a force-directed embedding (ForceAtlas2). This acts directly on the directed graph of pages and their links, I think you would need some other representation to do PCA.
You could likely run ForceAtlas2 in 3D or higher and get better clustering fidelity, but that obviously makes visualization harder.
You could likely run ForceAtlas2 in 3D or higher and get better clustering fidelity, but that obviously makes visualization harder.
Offline, I parsed the May 2026 English Wikipedia full-text dump into a directed graph, used cuGraph on a GPU to run PageRank, Leiden clustering, and ForceAtlas2 for the layout. I did some post processing to get rid of lingering overlapping nodes and rendered a tiled map of raster base images (using Skia) and JSON metadata. Tiles are bundled into PMTiles. The frontend is Deck.gl.
Everything is hosted on Cloudflare. Search and shortest-path are served by a Rust backend in CF Containers which uses Tantivy and bidirectional BFS.
Happy to answer any questions!