Perihelion Graph

Perihelion is a different way to move through what we collectively know. You start on a topic — any of the millions Wikipedia covers. Around it sit six things it is connected to: a person, a place, a work, an event, an idea. Tap one and it slides to the centre, and six new connections open around it. There is no results page and no ranked list. There is only where you are and where you can go next, and the way back is always on screen. Keep going and the interesting thing happens. Four or five hops in you are somewhere you could never have searched for, having arrived by a path you can still trace. A composer leads to a city, the city to a physicist, the physicist to an idea that turns up again somewhere you did not expect. HOW IT WORKS Nothing is bundled and nothing is invented. Every topic and every connection is read live from Wikidata, the structured database behind Wikipedia, released into the public domain. Article summaries come from Wikipedia itself, credited where they appear. Connections are drawn at random from everything a topic actually records, favouring the ones widely enough known to recognise. Return to a topic later and you will be offered a different six. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO No account. No advertising. No analytics. Nothing about you is collected or stored — there is no server to send it to. Perihelion needs an internet connection, because the graph is the whole of Wikidata rather than a copy in your pocket.