Filed under: Utilities, Features, Productivity, Web services
5 ways to enhance your Wikipedia experience
1) Save a trip to Wikipedia.com with AQwikWiki or QuickWiki
Sometimes you run across a term on a webpage that you want to check out on Wikipedia, but you'd also like to finish reading the rest of the page. If you install these add-ons for Firefox, you can have both. AQwikWiki lets you highlight a term and right-click to insert the Wikipedia definition into the text in a yellow highlight. QuickWiki uses a customizable key combo plus a click on a word, and pops the definition up in a box. They're two different methods of doing basically the safe thing, but either way, you don't even have to bother leaving the page.
2) Access Wikipedia quickly from your iPhone with Wikiamo or Wikipanion
Both of these iPhone apps are designed to browse Wikipedia more efficiently from your iPhone. They each have their own unique feature sets, so you'll have to decide which one works better for you. This is much is for sure, though: they both make Wikipedia faster to search and easier to read than if you just browsed to it in Safari.
3) Download Wikipedia for offline browsing with Wikitaxi
If you're a Windows user, you can get WikiTaxi and keep a dump of Wikipedia on your hard drive, or even on a large thumbdrive. Apparently the entirety of the English version only takes up 8 gigs. Even when your Internet connection is down, or your school or work blocks Wikipedia for some reason, you can still have it with you.
4) Find what you're looking for with Wikiproxy and Smarter Wikipedia
Wikiproxy is a Greasemonkey script that links key terms on the webpages you browse to their corresponding Wikipedia pages. It's a bit like turning your web experience into one giant Wikipedia page.
Smarter Wikipedia recommends related pages within Wikipedia itself. With this script installed, you get a related pages menu on the Wikipedia sidebar that makes it even easier to kill an afternoon stumbling through fascinating new facts. Definitely essential for serious trivia junkies.
5) Edit Wikipedia more efficiently with WikEd
WikEd is a Greasemonkey script that opens up a full-featured WYSIWYG wiki editor that works on Wikipedia and some other wikis, too. If you can't remember how to do all those pesky wiki formatting codes when you edit Wikipedia articles, WikEd will help you out a lot. There's a whole palette of options that you can use by clicking, so you don't worry about getting the format wrong when you're making changes to an article.
And don't forget Simplepedia, a script that gives Wikipedia a stylish, minimalist facelift. It's been featured on Download Squad before, but it's definitely worth mentioning again.
If you're a Windows user, you can get WikiTaxi and keep a dump of Wikipedia on your hard drive, or even on a large thumbdrive. Apparently the entirety of the English version only takes up 8 gigs. Even when your Internet connection is down, or your school or work blocks Wikipedia for some reason, you can still have it with you.
4) Find what you're looking for with Wikiproxy and Smarter Wikipedia
Wikiproxy is a Greasemonkey script that links key terms on the webpages you browse to their corresponding Wikipedia pages. It's a bit like turning your web experience into one giant Wikipedia page.
Smarter Wikipedia recommends related pages within Wikipedia itself. With this script installed, you get a related pages menu on the Wikipedia sidebar that makes it even easier to kill an afternoon stumbling through fascinating new facts. Definitely essential for serious trivia junkies.
5) Edit Wikipedia more efficiently with WikEd
WikEd is a Greasemonkey script that opens up a full-featured WYSIWYG wiki editor that works on Wikipedia and some other wikis, too. If you can't remember how to do all those pesky wiki formatting codes when you edit Wikipedia articles, WikEd will help you out a lot. There's a whole palette of options that you can use by clicking, so you don't worry about getting the format wrong when you're making changes to an article.
And don't forget Simplepedia, a script that gives Wikipedia a stylish, minimalist facelift. It's been featured on Download Squad before, but it's definitely worth mentioning again.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Dr. Chuck said 7:15PM on 2-27-2009
I sometimes like to use Wapedia on my Palm Tungsten E2 (Palm OS lives!)
http://www.wapedia.org/
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Abscissa said 11:25PM on 3-02-2009
"Sometimes you run across a term on a webpage that you want to check out on Wikipedia, but you'd also like to finish reading the rest of the page."
I just have Wikipedia as one of my FF search box engines, and have the search box set to open in a new tab (Might need the Tab Mix Plus plugin for that, not sure). That solves that for me.
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Solidgol said 1:09PM on 3-09-2009
Try the lookitup2 Greasemonkey script as well. It lets you highlight a word and press w to pop up a sidebar with the wikipedia article. It can also do google searches.
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Ranjit said 7:24PM on 3-17-2009
MashLogic for Firefox is an add-on that *automatically* adds links to Wikipedia topics from any web page. Mouse over these links to see a short summary or click-through to the topic page on Wikipedia.
This is also useful within Wikipedia for previewing links to other topics before you decide to visit the page.
http://mashlogic.com
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Praveen Premchandran said 10:07AM on 3-22-2009
Is there an addon for Firefox which displays a cache of the wikipedia site that I have already viewed before and then load in the meantime the updated page that I am visiting?
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john said 3:22AM on 3-27-2009
If you have a Wikipedia account, you don't have to install GreaseMonkey and WikEd. Just click on WikEd in the Gadgets section of your Settings page on Wikipedia.
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