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Filed under: Utilities, Features, Productivity, Web services

5 ways to enhance your Wikipedia experience


Wikipedia is one of the most-visited sites on the Internet, for very good reason. If you're like me, and Wikipedia is your starting point for research on any topic -- and your starting and stopping point for quick facts -- then you might be interested in a handful of ways to make your Wikipedia experience faster, more attractive or more integrated. Give Wikipedia a boost with these great apps and add-ons:

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.


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Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Search

Need Wikipedia when you can't get online? Get Wikitaxi


Wikipedia is a great source of information, and it's getting bigger every day. If you're like me, you'd be hard pressed to go a day without looking something up on Wikipedia. But sometimes you might not have Internet access -- devastating, I know! -- and you still need to know whether there's a grammatically correct sentence made up entirely of the word "buffalo." Well, it's a good thing there's Wikitaxi, an offline Wikipedia app.

With Wikitaxi, you can snag the entire database of Wikipedia -- or, if you're pressed for bandwidth, the Simple English version is a lot smaller -- and read it offline on your Windows machine. It comes with a separate importer app that you can point at a database, and then you can use the main Wikitaxi app to run searches on it. Those clever people at Lifehacker suggest that you carry it around on a USB drive: then you can prove that buffalo thing to your friends at a moment's notice!

[via Lifehacker]

Filed under: Internet, Search

Put Wikipedia In Your Pocket

Pocket WikipediaSure, Wikipedia may be one of the best places on the internet to find information on just about anything in a hurry, but what about when you're stuck in an elevator during a blackout and you can't remember who wrote The Republic? Relax! Pocket Wikipedia provides quick access to important articles offline - and on just about any kind of device.

The download includes about 24,000 images and over 14 million words covering about 5,000 articles. Each one has been carefully hand-picked from Wikipedia's massive repository of community-assembled knowledge to avoid some of the more important omissions from Wikipedia's own Cd-Rom version Pocket Wikipedia is currently available for Windows, Linux, and PocketPC only.

Want it? Keep in mind the old adage "All good things come to those who wait." None of the mirrors we found were all that fast, but it's too good a download to ignore.

[via Best Freeware and Lifehacker]

Filed under: Fun

Google Earth coordinates for all of Wikipedia

Wikipedia for Google Earth
You may or may not be aware that Wikipedia contains the geographical coordinates for thousands of cities, landmarks, and other geographical features, and there's an ongoing WikiProject to add latitude and longitude data to every place in the online encyclopedia. This is pretty cool, as it allows you to check out a Wikipedia article and jump straight to a Google Maps satellite view or punch the place into your GPS unit. But wouldn't it be cooler if you could do the opposite, i.e. look at a map and see all the associated Wikipedia articles? You know where I'm going with this--Wikipedia for Google Earth. One clever soul has taken a snapshot of the geocoordinates Wikipedia makes available and put them together as a .KMZ file that you can load into Google Earth. There are tens of thousands of coordinate pairs in the nearly 2MB XML file, but they're all logically separated into layers since seeing them all at once is a tad overwhelming. It's available in both English and German, and uses Google Earth's built-in web browser to display the Wikipedia article when you click on a placemark. Very cool.

[Via Waxy.org]

Filed under: Developer, Web services

gotAPI: Slick web developer's reference

gotAPIgotAPI is a cool Ajaxy web app that gives you quick access to reference materials for a variety of web technologies. On the top there's a list of languages including HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, Java, Perl, and six others, and when you click on one of them the list of HTML tags, JavaScript objects, PHP functions, etc. pops up. There's a search box at the top for finding items quickly, and clicking on an item brings up a reference page at the W3C , MSDN, W3Schools, and the like. I wish there were more languages available (Ruby, Python, and XUL, for example), but it's a great one-stop resource of a lot of tasks.

Filed under: Developer, Windows, Macintosh, Linux

Browser Tip of the Day: HTML, CSS, and DOM reference right at your fingertips, plus a few more

DevBoiDevBoi is a simple and cool extension with a silly name by Martin Cohen. It's a sidebar for Firefox that gives you quick access to the documentation for HTML (plus entities), CSS, DOM, XUL, Ruby, and Ruby on Rails. All that's lacking is a modern XHTML 1.0 reference (and adding PHP, Java, Python, JavaScript, and so on wouldn't hurt), and perhaps an about:config-style filter box. Hopefully those will be included in a future release.

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The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

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, ...

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