There are many ways to look at and browse through Wikipedia. From browser extensions and plugins to web apps that make browsing Wikipedia more than a scholarly exercise. The vast bank of human knowledge stored within Wikipedia pages also makes for some interesting uses – some which you might not even consider seriously. But checking out these five useful ways of using Wikipedia could be worth your reading time.

Search Wikipedia for “Experts”

It is safe to assume that Wikipedia contributors or Wikipedians know what they are talking, or rather writing about. You can pick any topic and search for a “subject matter expert” you can contact. Let’s say I am searching some information on ‘Arteriolosclerosis’. Clicking on the View History link takes you to the page where revisions from Wikipedians who contributed to the page are listed. Click on the user name to learn more about the contributor, and then click on Talk to leave him a message.

But remember that Wikipedia should be just a starting place for your research and not the end point. The Golden Rule still applies: Don’t believe everything you read on the web. If you are looking for sensitive information, especially related to health and medicine, Wikipedia “facts’ should be corroborated by professional opinion and hard facts.

Get the Bigger Picture with Wikipedia Statistics

As the page itself says, it’s almost impossible for a human to grab all of Wikipedia. So, the statistics page was conjured up to give a bird’s eye view of what’s happening within the boiler rooms of this online encyclopedia. For instance, Wikitrends tells you at a glance what’s trending on Wikipedia. Uptrends and downtrends are available across languages and time spans. Reading the top stories could help you connect the dots as to why the stories are gaining popularity.

Wikipedia as a Foreign Language Dictionary

I came across this old article (dated 2009) which explains how you can use Wikipedia for language translations. You can take advantage of the Wikipedia language sidebar to go to the foreign language specific page and get the equivalent word or term. Of course, it might be a synonym and not an exact translation, but even then Wikipedia and its multi-lingual versions offer an offbeat language learning tool.

Wikipedia as a Time Capsule

Did you know that Wikipedia has a Timeline of the far future? This timeline among all the other timelines that are listed in Wikipedia covers events from just about eight thousand years from now to the farthest edges of future time. It is based on scientific predictions, astrophysics, and plate-tectonics among other things. The List of Centuries breaks down each millennia and century (from 4rth Century BC to 40^th Century AD), into its major events – social, political, and technological. You can literally track time using the vast storehouse of information on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia for A Few Laughs

Everything’s not serious about Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a page devoted to deleted articles with freaky titles; because, as the page so eloquently puts it – Wikipedians too loose their minds occasionally. It’s a real pity that the articles stand deleted and only the titles remain. Topics like “Butt munchers” and “Dog Fart Neutralizing Thong” would have made for an interesting read.

In some quarters, Wikipedia may not be taken as a credible source. But as a jumping off point for further exploration, it more than serves its purpose. We have taken a close look at Wikipedia over the years. Have we missed some tip, some unique way to use Wikipedia more effectively? Give us your take if you use it in an interesting way.

Perhaps that’s why the guys at Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit parent body have several other pet projects running. We often have given them a go by without realizing there niche value.

So, I would just like to pause here and take a look at the informational value of the eight sister wikis from Wikimedia.

1. Wikimedia Commons

   

If you are looking for public domain photos to use, then this is bookmark worthy. At last count it had a repository of “˜4,127,824 freely usable media files’. The term “˜freely usable‘ implies files under public domain, Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike and GNU Free Documentation Licenses. The content (audio, music, image, and video files) is arranged by topic, location, type, author, by license and by source. There are some gems to be found ““ type Greg Williams in the search box and you will be taken to his Wikiworld Archive of illustrations and cartoons.

2. Wikinews

   

There’s a coterie of news hounds calling themselves as citizen journalists behind Wikinews. The news is not classified into channels but Wikinews taps into the distributed nature of the internet to break news from all parts of the globe. Sources are cited below the news article to give the piece authenticity. News can be also read by region or by language. Tickers on the Weather, Crude Oil Prices, Market Indices and Sports Scores give a rounded picture. One can also catch up with the latest on Wikinews on an IRC channel, on Twitter or through a RSS feed. There is an audio brief option too.

And if your sense of fun lies in current affairs why not try out the World News Quiz page through the link at the top of the page.

3. Wikibooks

   

Wikibooks is an accumulation of free e-book resources comprising of textbooks, language courses, manuals, and public domain books. The direct beneficiaries of Wikibooks are students, and teachers in high-schools and universities. It is an important resource for self learning and reference. The English version alone has nearly 28,000 modules from over 3,000 developing books. Subjects cover the gamut of Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, Computers and Humanities.

Within Wikibooks, there are two diverging links which point to Wikijunior, a wiki resource for children and Simple English, a wiki with simplified English books. Both are still developing works which focus on creating content for children upto age 12 and books for easy readability.

4. Wikisource

   

It’s an internet archive of free content totaling to about 123,965 texts in the English database. More tuned towards the serious reader, there are some literary gems to be found in Wikisource. You might like to try out “˜The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin’ or Abraham Lincoln’s speeches. Wikisource is arranged around an Index of Works and an Index of Authors which along with the search box helps us to drill down to any relevant text. Classics, speeches and translated text can be found here.

5. Wikiversity

   

Wikiversity serves like an education portal where teachers and students can collaborate in an open learning environment. It is a method of “˜experimental learning’ where teachers combine with students to create educational content from the ground up. “˜Learning by doing’ is the central theme around which Wikiversity hopes to evolve. For those interested, Wikiversity is a vital e-learning medium. Belying its name, Wikiversity has educational courses across all educational levels. For instance, I got interested in the Technical Writing course which was offered Level 1 and Level 2 courses on the subject with a workshop on writing system requirement specifications. The resource allows me to learn, contribute and even interact with an instructor.

6. Wiktionary

   

Wiktionary is now not only a dictionary but also a thesaurus and also includes etymologies, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms and translations. It is building itself up to be a comprehensive word reference source. A Rhymes listing, Frequency listing and a Phrasebook are also part of Wiktionary. With 1,195,489 English words, it is a useful catalogue. A user can get to all the nuances of a word using the Define box on the page. An audio translation is also available to understand the typical pronunciation. One can also link to the other language Wiktionary pages to get the meaning of a foreign word.

7. Wikiquote

   

Wondering who said “˜Fools rush where Angels fear to tread‘? It could be among the 16,508 citations in Wikiquote. A compendium of quotes from around the world, this wiki is browsable by People, Literary works, Films, TV shows, Special Themes and Miscellaneous entries.

Note: The quote was by Sir Richard Francis Burton

8. Wikispecies

It might not immediately goad our interest but this wiki lists 179,317 taxonomic entries sourced from species records in the natural world. This makes it an important resource for a life science student.

Wikipedia and its sister sites have offered us what no other information medium has so far ““ a comprehensive knowledge wealth and the power to share and edit it for free. So are you among the ones who go over to the other Wikis for information or do you remain rooted to the main Wikipedia? Let us know how you use Wikipedia’s knowledge for your own.

Also make sure to check out 12 Popular Wikis that actually “˜WORK’. While Wikipedia is the biggest wiki out there, there are a number of other niche wikis that are very popular in their medium.

But imagine that you are marooned on an island with just your rusty laptop….OK, strike out the ‘Gilligan’s Island’ scenario and look at a more realistic setting of being away from a net connection. Get the picture? Here’s where some of the offline tools for Wikipedia browsing come in handy.

The Wikimedia Foundation has set up an offline Wikipedia version themselves understanding this need. The English version with a collection of about 2000 pages can be had in the form of a CD (an ISO file). But it comes at a cost of $13.99.

The penny pinchers among us have to put in a bit more effort and megabytes. But despair not. Here are four free tools for taking the Wikipedia knowledge off the net and into an anytime, anywhere experience.

I. WikiTaxi (OS: Windows)

All downloaded pages are stored in a WikiTaxi database. WikiTaxi uses compression to make sure that the database remains compact enough. For instance, the huge English Wikipedia easily fits on an 8 GB memory stick. WikiTaxi itself does not require an installation as it runs from an executable. The process to download the information is a bit long drawn out as you have to essentially download a XML database dump from the Wikipedia site containing the wiki content (The largest English Wiki is 3.5 GB).

An included WinTaxi importer contains this database into a WinTaxi database for you to browse offline. The database dumps are updated every few weeks. So you need to go online to get the most recent version of the information.

II. Zipedia (OS:Windows)

Zipedia is a Mozilla Add-on for Firefox enabling offline browsing. The Zipedia page describes it as the ‘poor man’s choice’. But when we don’t have access to the real thing, then it’s a worthy choice isn’t it? You will still need to download the Wikipedia database dump. Zipedia does not need any external database as this is done by the browser itself. The add-on works with Firefox v2.0-3.0+. To access the offline resource you need to just type in – wikipedia://wiki/

III. Wikislice (OS: Windows)

Wikislice is an application that allows the user to collate Wikipedia entries based on a particular topic or subtopic. Wikislice as the name suggests gives you a ‘slice’ of the information in a downloadable format for easy reading offline. Wikislice comes as a web based tool as well as a desktop interface. To use Wikislice, just type the topic of your interest in the search bar provided and Wikislice will display all the applicable information for you to browse or download.

Here’s how it works -

1. Type in your topic and click ‘Go’.
2. You get the information and related subtopics (for more narrow searches).
3. The Top 50 topics are displayed over 5 pages.
4. Download the Wikislice (part of Wikipedia) offline if the number of pages is less than 2000.
5. The downloaded pages can be used with the Webaroo software. The app will check if you have the software installed on first use. In case you don’t, it will prompt you for the download.

Here’s a simple slideshow from the main site.

IV. Pocket Wikipedia (OS:Windows/ Linux and PocketPC)

Pocket Wikipedia is a carefully compiled handpicked selection of Wikipedia information and comprises of nearly 24,000 images and 14 million words. That’s a stack of fifteen volume encyclopedias (Encyclopedia Britannica has 40 million words and 24,000 images!). All within a 180MB free download in a single zip archive. This software differs from the others in one aspect – you get pictures within the text as in the original version. But remember that it does not contain the entire gamut of Wikipedia; just the more important ones for ready reference.

(Bonus V) How To Get Wikipedia on Your iPod

If you have an iPod and couple of GBs of spare space you can also install Wikipedia right onto it. For more details check out Mark’s excellent guide on How To Install Wikipedia on Your iPod.

Have you used any of these four software apps? If so, which do you prefer? Do you have another that you prefer instead? Or do you prefer accessing Wikipedia via the web?