langreiter.com plain, simple: comment-2002-04-22-2

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comment-2002-04-22-2

CREATED BY alex_s • LAST EDITED BY alex_s 8347 days AGO

Density of the linkage? Was it too high or too low. If you found that the density was too high then it could be helpfull manually hide some of the nodes, especially the center node. That tends to loosen the graph up so that you can see the interrelations between the peripheral links. ... If the density was too low, then you could just increase the radius, and chose to show back links.

Also, another problem is that it's Your wiki. My guess is that this tool would be most helpfull to those unfamiliar with a wiki that want to get an overview of it's contents. Having categories and road maps is one way of doing so, and having a graph of the interconnections between the pages is another. It could even be argued that the graph gives a more objective look at a wiki, since it does not depend on someone to give a summary (... but I won't argue this :)

A final comment is that there is an inherent difficulty in doing this kind of visualization, and that is that the data was not intentionally designed to be visualized. The TGWikiBrowser allows for an "after the fact" visualization of the data. The hope is that once such visualizations become available, users can seek feedback from the visual representation of their work, and thus produce a prettier picture. Of course, I don't expect this to happen for Wikis in their current incarnation, but perhaps a better system could be built where this type of feedback would indeed occur.

--Alex