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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

Building a Chrome extension is a good learning process so congratulations for that. I love going through random Wikipedia pages. More generally though, if "in your bookmarks bar" is good enough rather than next to the address bar, one could drag this link in and rename it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

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That's pretty cool. I built a backend with titles list etc. It seems in vain now. Hehe :). Any suggestions to make stumbling Wikipedia more meaningful?

I think your extension could provide value if people could choose a field of interest. Like if I could stumble through articles about China or about animals or even about broad things like people or places, that would be neat.

Great idea. I will add broad categories selection.

That might be handy for people who want to study a certain subject one day. For example, if I could keep hitting a button to get random articles from a certain category, such as computer science or math.

Maybe a Bayesian filter (or some analogous technique) that found "interesting" articles?

This didn't crossed my mind at all. I wonder if extension should add an upvote button to Wiki page and use that for interesting?

Ah yes, didn't see this comment before I wrote my last one. But exactly, that would certainly be interesting if you got enough users to make the results meaningful (or perhaps curated a large bunch yourself initially).

Another thing that might be handy for something like this long term is making sure I don't see the same page more than once. But that would be a lot more data for you to store.

I'd rather have it tailored to my personal taste instead of a community thing, myself.

Yes. Like StumbleUpon I'd rather "stumble" across pages that are actually interesting.

When you use Wikipedia's own system you get some really inane pages with statistics about minor towns or the like.. but I'd rather hit a button and get something that's either curated and known to be good OR that other users of your extension have voted up in some way.

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