# know/edge

## The Concept

A highly functional, concept-centric approach for exploring and discovering knowledge within Wikipedia.

We believe Wikipedia is one of the more impressive feats of human ingenuity and progress - by leveraging the fantastic new abilities granted to us via the internet, the ever-growing network of editors has produced a collection of knowledge with more depth, breadth, and accuracy than an encyclopedia. We find this to be an elegant metaphor for the power of open and transparent production of knowledge. In the words of Katherine Maher, CEO of the Wikimedia foundation,
> "Wikipedia is yours: yours to read, yours to edit, yours in which to get lost. We’re not the destination, we’re the beginning".

In keeping with this mentality, know/edge will be always and forever free to access, use, and share.

One of the more familiar ways people utilize Wikipedia is through clicking - searching for an article, and clicking through articles until they find what they are looking for (and hopefully learning along the way). This project seeks to provide a more associative way to approach wikipedia from a conceptual paradigm. Rather than looking for a single point of information, our intent is to construct a searchable interrelation network. This associative approach can be employed to discover all sorts of interesting relationships that would not have otherwise been apparent.

The current single-article experience Wikipedia presents is seriously limiting for getting a comprehensive understanding of how various concepts are interrelated with one another.

Know/edge will be a graph database created from the entirety of Wikipedia. By treating articles as nodes and linked articles as relations, various path finding and semantic parsing algorithms can be utilized to intelligently explore similar articles.

## Video
[https://vimeo.com/329250678](https://vimeo.com/329250678)

## Milestones
**DONE**
- ideation
- assembled our team
- formalized initial concept
- established product vision
- determined feature roadmap
- outlined MVP feature set
- identified technical requirements
- deployed graph database with mock data set
- develop Alpha UI
- connect UI to backend data

**DOING**
- deploy real Wiki data pipeline
- draft initial UI design language
- iteratively apply design language to UI

**TO DO**
- private beta
- continued progress along feature roadmap

## The Team

### Tom Bandage - Back-end Engineer
tombandage.com
DevOps Engineer and sculptor, harboring a deep fascination for the systems that produce and distribute knowledge at an epistemological level.

### Adam Zeiner - Designer
dezein.co
Interaction Designer and Organizer focused on complex systems, applying futures-thinking, information architecture, visualization, tech-based arts, and building communities of practice.

### Shelby Wilson - Front-end Engineer
westsoutheast.com
Front-end Engineer with a passion for data visualization and a scholastic background in computer science and Russian language and culture.

### Peter Silkowski - Designer
Designer focused on visual communication, establishing interface design systems, testing assumptions, and learning how decision making effects groups of people.

## Contact

Drop us a line at [e-mail]

## Quote from Archaeology of Knowledge
> “The history of ideas, then, is the discipline of beginnings and ends, the description of obscure continuities and returns, the reconstitution of developments in the linear form of history. But it can also, by that very fact, describe, from one domain to another, the whole interplay of exchanges and intermediaries: it shows how scientific knowledge is diffused, gives rise to philosophical concepts, and takes form perhaps in literary works; it shows how problems, notions, themes may emigrate from the philosophical field where they were formulated to scientific or political discourses; it relates work with institutions, social customs or behaviour, techniques, and unrecorded needs and practices; it tries to revive the most elaborate forms of discourse in the concrete landscape, in the midst of the growth and development that witnessed their birth. It becomes therefore the discipline of interferences, the description of the concentric circles that surround works, underline them, relate them to one another, and insert them into whatever they are not.”

**Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language**