I think a lot about searching, but I think about search results, too, and the way information is organized.

Often search results are presented by relevance, by date, or alphabetically. But does it always have to be that way? If you’re grouping specific kinds of content there might be a host of other parameters available.

When you have the ability to sort information in different ways, you’re able to look at it from different perspectives. That leads you to different ideas or new avenues of exploration.

I wanted to make a sorter that used something besides date or alphabet. So I turned to the Wikipedia API (which is basically my personal fun park) and decided to see if I could make a people-sorter. And that’s why there’s Wiki Bunch ( https://searchgizmos.com/wikibunch/ ). Wiki Bunch takes a Wikipedia category (ideally one containing people so you get results) and sorts them by age, gender, or place of education. (Wiki Bunch also offers the option to sort by place of birth, but the parameters on that are so wide – everything from a hospital to a state – that it doesn’t work well.)

Using Wiki Bunch is really simple. Enter a Wikipedia category (you can paste the URL of the category page to make it easy) and choose what you want to group the pages by. The default is grouping American astronauts by age. When you’ve made your selection hit the blue button.

Wiki Bunch will think for a few seconds (sometimes for MANY seconds if it’s a big category) and then present you with a list of Wikipedia pages grouped by your property of preference.

All properties Wiki Bunch sorts by except age are available as discrete Wikidata properties. Age, however, isn’t: Wiki Bunch has to calculate it based on birth date and the current date, as well as filter out pages with death dates. This means sometimes there will be oddities; occasionally a death date property isn’t available and you’ll find a 150-year-old person on your list. Some people have incomplete birth dates (just the year, for example) and those aren’t included as they can’t be properly calculated.