Simple Wikiclaudia

Have you ever been reading a Wikipedia article and tapped out because it's just too dense and difficult to read? Simple English Wikipedia exists to help make articles easier to read and understand. I sometimes find myself drifting to it for technical concepts, but sometimes those articles don't exist. So I made Simple Wikiclaudia. You can download it from the Google Web Store!

It's a simple Chrome extension that will detect if the page you're reading has a simple.wikipedia.org version of the article you're reading. If it does, great! Click the button to open it. If not, it will use Claude or ChatGPT to simplify it for you.

How I made it

I didn't even bother looking to see if something like this already exists because I had such a clear vision of what I wanted. It's one step closer to truly personalized software. Besides, it was fun, and now I'm writing about it to put a bow on this project.

Actually, I initially wanted to use Claude's new API feature, which could use this extension to paste right into the artifact. However, I quickly ran into a pretty crucial technical limitation: you can't input anything into artifacts. Not even a query parameter! It's more secure, but not helpful for me. Then I realized I don't even need artifacts since I can easily paste right into the normal chat interface. At that point, it's trivial to do the same thing for ChatGPT.

Claude Code is so good. Following Harper Reed's guidelines, I was able to quickly spin up a prototype. I love working right in VSCode with Claude taking up the lower half of the window. The best part is it's not limited to just tweaking your code; right from the terminal it can search the web, run build commands, commit to git, and just about anything you'll allow in a terminal.

I submitted the extension to the Chrome Web Store and will update this page when it's ready. That process was relatively nice and straightforward. Unfortunately, it looks like the approval process can take up to thirty days ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ [Update: it only took a few hours!]