A tree of English Wikipedia articles that grows by itself, around the clock, on a server: every few seconds while someone has this page open and in view (up to 6,000 articles a day), and about once a minute otherwise. Everyone who opens this page sees the same tree.
Once an hour it starts a new branch from what is happening at that time: a news item from Wikipedia’s Current events portal, the featured article, a most-read article, an event from this date in history, the latest magnitude 4.5+ earthquake, a place the International Space Station passed over, an article a person is editing right now, a place near Tampa Bay, a less-performed piano piece, and a random article.
Between hours, one article at a time grows 1–4 of the articles it links to. Links whose words appear nowhere else in the tree are the most likely to be kept, so the tree keeps moving into topics it has not covered yet. Links about piano, music, physics, evolution, plants, the sea, weather, Japan, chess and a few other interests are 1.7 times as likely. A link to an article already in the tree is drawn as a dotted line instead of a new branch.
Each branch is about 70% the length of its parent and fans out the same way, so every part of the tree has the shape of the whole. Zoom in anywhere to see deeper generations. The current wind in Tampa Bay sways the branches, and rain or a thunderstorm there appears here too.
Each new branch plays one note on a sampled grand piano when it finishes growing: low near the trunk, high at the tips, louder and further from the last note when its words are newer to the tree. The left hand changes chord every 7–12 seconds, in the key of that hour’s piano piece.
Drag to move, scroll or pinch to zoom, click an article to read it, double-click to grow from it.
Article text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0) via the Wikimedia APIs. Earthquakes: USGS. Weather: Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0). Tides: NOAA CO-OPS, Old Port Tampa. ISS position: wheretheiss.at. Piano: Salamander Grand Piano V3 by Alexander Holm (CC BY 3.0).