Try one
- Krakatoa — the volcano that was heard three thousand miles away
- Sunda Strait — the water it blew apart, between Java and Sumatra
- Panaitan — an island in that strait, emptied by the wave
How it works
Open a place on the globe — from a base you dropped, or from a trail somebody sent you. Next to the button that takes you to Wikipedia there is a second one: rabbit hole. It asks Wikipedia what that article links to, keeps everything that has coordinates, and puts it on the map and in a list beside it.
Pick one and the globe flies there. The trail you have walked stays along the top, so you can see where you came from and step back to any point of it. Everything you have already visited is dropped from the next set of choices — that is what makes it a path instead of a bounce between two articles.
The trail is a link
Nothing is stored and there is no account. Your trail lives inside its own address —
/app/?hole=Q82613-Q192790-Q1861129 — so sending somebody the path you walked is
just sending them a link. It opens on their globe at your last stop, with your steps behind
it, and they carry on from there.
The identifiers are Wikidata's rather than article titles, because a page can be renamed and an identifier cannot. A trail from a year ago still opens.
What it will not do
- Only what can be put on a map. An article has to carry coordinates to appear, and about one in ten does — a typical page offers between ten and forty places out of the two hundred things it mentions. Ideas, people and events without a location are not there.
- Big articles sink. «Belgium» and «Brussels» are linked from half of Europe, and near the top they would take every click and make each hop look like the last one. Anything past about a hundred and fifty thousand characters goes to the bottom of the list instead of disappearing — if you want it, it is there.
- It reads Wikipedia live. Nothing is cached on our side, so what you see is what the article says today, and a page with no outgoing links that go anywhere is a dead end.
Where to start one
Anywhere. Open the globe, centre somewhere you are curious about, tap Explore here, and open any of the places that light up. The button is in the card that opens — and from there it is the same gesture over and over.