Doomscrolling, but you actually learn something.
I've always been the person who opens one Wikipedia article and somehow ends up three hours later reading about the mating habits of sea slugs. Classic rabbit hole stuff. At some point I thought, why not just have an app that throws random interesting content at me? Like Social Media, but instead of posts, images, and videos it's "knowledge".
So I built WikiWisch. "Wisch" is German for swipe/wipe, felt fitting.
The app pulls from seven different sources:
- Wikipedia — Random articles filtered by topic (history, science, tech, etc.)
- arXiv — Latest research papers across CS, physics, math, biology, economics. Pick your field.
- medRxiv — Health sciences preprints. Epidemiology, oncology, neurology, the whole medical research world.
- bioRxiv — Biology preprints. Neuroscience, genetics, cell biology, evolution.
- Art Institute of Chicago — Public domain artwork. Paintings, sculptures, the good stuff.
- NASA APOD — Astronomy Picture of the Day. Space photos with explanations.
- On This Day — What happened on today's date throughout history.
You can enable/disable any feed you want — maybe you're not into art, or you only care about arXiv. Your call. Tabs can be reordered too. The research feeds (arXiv, medRxiv, bioRxiv) have topic filters so you can narrow down to your field.
Everything's saved in your browser — bookmarks, preferences, tab order, topic selections. No accounts, no backend, no cookies tracking you around the internet.
git clone https://github.com/MaxMLang/wikiwisch.git
cd wikiwisch
npm install
npm run devThat's it. Opens on localhost:5173.
This wouldn't exist without these APIs:
- Wikipedia REST API — Content under CC BY-SA 3.0
- arXiv API — Papers subject to individual author licenses
- bioRxiv/medRxiv API — Preprints, subject to individual licenses
- Art Institute of Chicago API — Public domain images
- NASA APOD API — Generally public domain
- Wikimedia Feed API — On This Day data
React 18 + Vite for the build, Tailwind for styling, TanStack Query for data fetching. Pretty standard stack, nothing fancy. Dark mode works, responsive on mobile.
Built by Max because I wanted something like this to exist.