I’ve stumbled upon Chris Harrison’s superb WikiViz project and, while it’s undoubtedly a brilliant thing, there’s some debate in the office: what’s it actually for?

It caught my eye thanks to the odd, yet fantastic concept – a visual representation of Wikipedia. The result is an truly gigantic image which has to be divided into 64 squares, each of them at a size of 2781 x 2781 pixels. These are very large images.

Select one of the pictures, and wait for it to load – I suggest making a cup of tea while you’re hanging around – and then have a look. Thousands of articles all linked together by vertices and edges, joined together depending on how they’re connected on the real Wikipedia site. It’s one of those things that I can just look at for ages, exploring and finding new stuff, a bit like Google Earth.

Except, I can’t help feel that they’ve missed an opportunity. I’d like the whole thing to be zoomable and interactive, rather than it being an image. I can fly around the visual version of Wikipedia and then click links when I want to read the article. It should be in 3D, with full control.

Perhaps I’m asking too much. It’s a brilliant demonstration of visualisation, as it is, but after seeing how cool this is, I’m clamouring for more.

What do you think – genuinely interesting exercise, or diverting – but ultimately pointless – distraction?