How wikiboard works

The mechanic

Clicking an internal Wikipedia link on a wikiboard opens the linked article as a second card beside the first, and draws a line between them. Click twenty more and the board holds the shape of the path you took, with every article on it still open.

Hold Ctrl or Cmd while clicking and the link opens on wikipedia.org in a new tab, because every anchor keeps its real href.

The cards hold the article itself

Each card contains the article HTML: paragraphs, infobox, tables, images, footnotes. You can select text in it, scroll it, resize the card, and click any link in it. That is why the board is DOM and CSS transforms rather than a drawing canvas. Text painted onto a bitmap cannot be selected and links painted onto it cannot be clicked, which would remove the interaction the whole idea rests on.

Cards live in one world that pans and zooms as a single surface, so a board of forty articles is a continuous space you move around in.

Each card is given one of six colours when it is created, and a card never gets the same colour as the card it came from. The header stripe and every connection leaving a card share its colour, which is what lets you follow a chain across a busy board at 40% zoom without reading a single title.

Where the articles come from

Your browser asks Wikipedia directly, through the public MediaWiki API. The request never passes through a server of ours, so we have no record of what you read and there is nothing in the middle to slow it down or go offline.

• Titles come from action=query&generator=prefixsearch, with the full-text index as a fallback.
• Article HTML comes from action=parse, with redirects resolved so one article is one card.
• The first paragraph and thumbnail come from the REST summary endpoint, so a card has content within a few hundred milliseconds.

Fetched articles are cached in your browser for a week, and four requests are the most that are ever in flight at once. Wikipedia runs on donations, and a tool that hammers its API deserves to be blocked.

The HTML is sanitized before it reaches the page, and the site sends a Content Security Policy that limits scripts, images and network calls to the handful of origins it needs.

Where your boards live

In your browser, in IndexedDB. There is no account and no sign-up, and your board is not copied to our servers until you press Share, which uploads the article titles and card positions and gives you a link. The article text stays out of that payload.

Boards save themselves as you work. You can also export one as JSON and import it again, which is how to move a board to another machine without a share link.

Performance

Forty live Wikipedia articles in one page is hundreds of megabytes. Cards further than a screen and a half from the viewport drop their article HTML and fall back to a title and a thumbnail; the cached copy in IndexedDB makes coming back to them instant.

Attribution

Wikipedia text is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Every card names the language edition it came from and links to the article, which is what that licence asks for. wikiboard has no affiliation with the Wikimedia Foundation.

Keyboard

• S search Wikipedia and add an article
• P drop a post-it note
• F fit the board, or focus the selected card
• 0 reset zoom
• Shift + drag to box-select, then A to connect
• ? the full list, or see the shortcuts page

Your boardsAll shortcuts