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Pan is a browser extension aimed at providing source content for webpages.

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What is Pan?

In college and beyond, many people suffer from information overload. Through countless courses, assignments and papers, it becomes easy to allow small details to slip our minds. This is where Pan comes in. Pan is your personal research assistant, aimed at providing easy access to subjects and sources.

What can Pan do?

In short, Pan will do the research for you. As you surf the internet, Pan will analyze the pages you allow it to, using state-of-the-art machine learning. In doing so, it will identify the subjects of what you are reading and find any corresponding Wikipedia pages for those subjects. After it has gathered this information, Pan will replace mentions of those subjects with their relevant links. This allows you to easily refresh your memory on old subjects, without getting too distracted trying to track down information.

This is a sample page, prior to Pan being used:


Before Pan

And here is the same page, after Pan does its magic!

As you can see, all of the subjects of this history article have been automatically replaced with source links, making it easy to quickly navigate to subject that you might need a refresher on.


After Pan

How do I use Pan?

Currently, Pan is unavailable to the public due to financial limitations. However, Pan is fairly easy to set up on either a local server, or a publicly available (and often very cheap) cloud solution such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud Service. If you are interested in doing this, you can find very thorough information in our documentation section. Documents for setting up the server can be found here and equally robust documentation on the extension is here. If there are any questions or issues, feel free to contact me or open up an Issue ticket.

FAQ

Why Wikipedia?

This is one of the most frequent questions I receive. The answer, firstly, is technical limitations. To be blunt, finding alternative sources for information is a technical mountain I simply do not have the time to climb. Secondly, Wikipedia is a fairly neutral source of information. While it is not infallible, most users are aware of its limitations, whereas other resources can be less transparent about their legitimacy.

Does Pan collect my data?

Pan takes data privacy very seriously. In order to function, Pan must observe your web browsing and send it to our server for analysis. However, this process is entirely anonymous. The information collected by our server is simply the article URL and the content of the page. This information is not tied back to you, as a user, in any form, nor is this data shared with anyone. Period.

How can I help?

If you would like to contribute to Pan, please refer to the contribution and developer setup documentation. If you are not a developer, contributions to help fund Pan would help to make it a public reality.

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Pan is a browser extension aimed at providing source content for webpages.

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