Mapping the Wikipedia Rabbit Hole

All of us have, at some time or another, fallen down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. You begin with the noble intention of looking up a single topic, only to find yourself tumbling through an unplanned journey of blue hyperlinks.

Start with Geradus Mercator, follow a link to Antwerp, hop over to the Tomorrowland festival, and before you know it you’re reading about Metallica. What began as a quick check on a 16th-century cartographer has somehow become a dive into heavy metal history.

Now there’s a map that turns the Wikipedia rabbit-hole into a visual, explorable geo-located network graph. WhereWiki is a new interactive map-based visualization that transforms Wikipedia's endless hyperlink connections into something you can watch unfold across a map.

How It Works

• Type the title of any English Wikipedia page into the search box - for example, “List of Art Deco architecture”, “Beekeeping”, or “Cold War espionage.”
• The map will then begin to populate with related pages, drawing link data from Wikipedia.
• As the results stream in, you’ll see a web of nodes and edges that show how your chosen topic connects to places and concepts across the map.

For some searches WhereWiki can be a genuinely useful way to discover locations related to your personal interests (for example finding nearby Art Deco buildings). At other times WhereWiki proves an entertaining way to uncover the unexpected relationships between the things you’re curious about and the places that shaped them.