Friday, July 20, 2007

Mapping Persepolis in wikis

One of the benefits as well as problems with wikis is the potential complexity and obscurity of their cross-references. A new tool, WikiMindMap allows you to visually unfold the network.

Choose your wiki (Wikipedia - sadly we can't yet try it out on the CDLI wiki), and then type in your topic (case matters!). For example, I started with Persepolis, which was reasonably complex, but with links in odd and possibly unexpected directions. Elamite and Achaemenid are very simple, Old Persian is more complex, Cuneiform is simple, but Mesopotamia is not. Curiously Phrygian is more complex than Aramaic. It is perhaps telling that Bible displays about the same level of complexity as Paris Hilton.

Comments?