Ginsburg Yardstick extension in action

The Ginsburg Yardstick is an extension for Google Chrome which, when installed, appears at the right end of the Omnibox with a little icon (a work in progress) any time you browse to a Wikipedia article.  If you click on the icon, a small popup appears that shows the word count for that article and then shows you how many multiples that is of the word count of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Wikipedia article.

To go download it, just click here to go to its page in the gallery of Google Chrome Extensions.  As I write this, it’s at version 0.1.

It’s my first effort in making a Google Chrome extension and should definitely be considered preliminary and alpha-quality.  Some things may be ugly or not working, and there’s still plenty to do to improve it.  In particular, I intend to make a much better icon as soon as I can (or as soon as someone contributes one), and I intend to add support for the SSL-secured version of Wikipedia, possibly localize it, improve the word count accuracy, and find out if it’s possible to automatically update the word count for Ms. Ginsburg’s article.

The idea was inspired by Raymond Chen’s one-off post on the subject of the relevance of Wikipedia articles.  I wrote a blog post in which I discussed the concept and fleshed out the idea just yesterday to make a Google Chrome extension so I could try out making one and see the idea in action.