The latest option has been exclusively designed for the Google Chrome web browser and therefor also Google’s Chromebook. The web application allows you to download nearly all textual contents from Wikipedia to make them available directly in the Chrome browser.

You are asked to either pick a 13 Megabyte dump of the most popular Wikipedia articles or the big database which weights in at about 1 Gigabyte. You can also select one of four available parsers which turn the Wikipedia information into HTML contents that are readable in the web browser.

Especially the large download make take a while, and you also need to make sure that you have enough disk space available for it.

Once installed you can use the following page to access your Wikipedia information offline in the Chrome browser. The developer suggests to bookmark the page for fast access.

It offers a search option, access to the program settings, access to the article index and an option to load a random article from the repository.

The search supports suggestions which are displayed automatically once you start typing in the first letter of your search term.

The articles are complete with the exception of media and the footnotes which are not displayed at all.

Search results are displayed almost instantly on modern computer systems.

Chrome users who would like their own personal Wikipedia copy on their computer can download and install the web app from the official Chrome web store. (via Chromestory)

The Stop Online Piracy Act in the US is getting ever more publicity with GoDaddy one of the high profile companies to suffer from supporting it as we wrote a couple of days ago.  In our previous article Martin summed up SOPA very effectively.

If you are living in the United States, you should have heard about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and Protect-IP, which, when passed, would give companies rights that they should not have. If it passes, IP rightsholders (a term vaguely defined) could send notices to payment processors or ad services like Google Adsense to force them to stop doing business with listed websites, all without legal process.

Site owners have five days to file a counter-notice, but neither payment processors or ad networks have any obligation to respect it. Even worse, they are granted “immunity for choking off a site if they have a “reasonable belief” that some portion of the site enables infringement”.

Now a loose confederation of Internet giants are considering shutting down the entire websites for 24 hours and instead showing a messagew urging their visitors and customers to contact their representative in the US congress the day before the vote goes to the house there.

The coalition is made up of some very big names on the Internet including Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, eBay, PayPal, AOL, Foursquare, IAC, LinkedIn, Mozilla, OpenDNS and Zynga.  If the plan goes ahead all these services could be taken offline for 24 hours.

In a report by CNet…

When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA, you’ll know they’re finally serious.

True, it would be the political equivalent of a nuclear option–possibly drawing retributions from the the influential politicos backing SOPA and Protect IP–but one that could nevertheless be launched in 2012.

“There have been some serious discussions about that,” says Markham Erickson, who heads the NetCoalition trade association that counts Google, Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo as members. “It has never happened before.”

This wouldn’t be the first piece of anti-piracy legislation around the world to face stiff opposition.  France have already passed an Internet copyright law but the Digital Economy Act in the UK stalled in the face of arguments from major Internet Service Providers British Telecom and TalkTalk.

Many reports say that SOPA is still set to pass the US congress and that very few Americans have heard about it.  Shutting down services such as Facebook and Google, and replacing them with anti-SOPA messages for a day would certainly raise awareness, but a question mark remains over whether doing so only one day before the congress vote would be effective enough.

This is the first time ever that major websites have threatened to effectively go on strike to boycott something, and it is completely unprecedented.  It is unclear at this time whether the services would be taken down worldwide or just in the US and also how serious the coalition are about the boycott, which would inevitably lose them all a day’s trade.

Services are commonly targeted for IP addresses anyway and it wouldn’t be difficult for these companies to target messages to their US-based users.  With many millions of visitors every day in the US, companies such as Google and Facebook could achieve this on their own.  Imagine then how much more leverage they would have with Amazon, Yahoo! and others on board.  If this goes ahead it is still possible that other companies could follow suit, effectively crippling the Internet in the US for the day before the vote.

So what do you think of SOPA and your favourite websites being taken offline for a day?

Easy PHP covers all of the installations necessary. Visit their website, as they take the credit for this. There is no need to set up an apache server, SQL database, or PHP 5.

You will find the download here: http://www.easyphp.org/. You will most likely face security warnings because this does involve many program files. Set a restore point and backup files before proceeding. The program will begin running automatically.

This is the desktop icon for version 5.3.6.1. Check the Administration page. This page will display when a working web-server is running.

MediaWiki is a free software open source wiki package written in PHP, originally for use on Wikipedia. It is now used by several other projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and by many other wikis, including this website, the home of MediaWiki.

Extract Media Wiki using 7-Zip under the “www” folder. The folder will be displayed by EasyPHP in the Administration page. EasyPHP deploys MediaWiki at this point. Under the Root icon, you can find the MediaWiki homepage. Click the icon and the installation wizard will take it from there. If you have disabled the Wizard, re-enable it.

Enable all image uploads if you need to place images. The wizard will create a file titled LocalSettings.php. MediaWiki offers a complete manual to guide you through personal settings. Place this file in the MediaWiki file created earlier. MonoBook comes with MediaWiki and will give you plenty of theme options for the Wiki you want to create.

This next page contains the important user links: “long in/create account,” “edit,” and “Special Pages.” Secure the Wiki by adding the following command to the LocalSettings.php file:

$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;

Go to the edit tab and experiment to learn about what you can do with this. Assign a new account by clicking the link in the upper right corner to create a new user account.

You can use the Special pages link in the other area of the window to create access to various administrative tools for your customized Wiki.

This is a basic set-up and files can be adapted to create preferences for user access. It is a versatile system but it takes some learning. Navigate the options and use the tutorial offered in order to get an overview of the myriad settings you can customize to your specifications. There is a User Import Extension to adapt to user networks and allow other users to utilize this tool for creating Wiki text and images. This can be downloaded under the Extensions folder. Use this for easy Wiki creations. Once you learn the options, this is simple to use for ongoing needs.

Wikipedia has grown over the years. The largest repository on site, the English language version of Wikipedia has broken the 13 Gigabytes barrier lately, and that’s text only. If you add images, you end up at 30+ Gigabytes of space.

Some users may not have Internet access all the time, which means that they cannot access Wikipedia during that time. Maybe you are on Safari in Africa, miles away from the nearest settlement, or on an Island in the Pacific Ocean with less than optimal Internet connections.

I have reviewed quite a few solutions to access Wikipedia without Internet connection. WikiTaxi or Okawix come to mind, or the manual option to install Wikipedia locally.

Okawix has been reviewed before at Ghacks, but that review is two years old. The developers have continuously worked on the application, which justifies another review. Wikipedia in this context refers to all official Wiki projects. This includes Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikibooks and Wikinews.

The program is available for Windows, Mac, Linux and the Android operating system. The Android version has not been available back then, and is one of the core improvements.

The offline reader ships without local Wikipedia databases, which means that you need to download at least one on first run. Databases are available as direct downloads in the program interface, and linked as torrents on the program homepage.

A language screen is displayed if you select to download a Wikipedia database from within the program interface. You need to pick one or multiple languages that you want to download first, and on the second screen one of the available Wikipedia dictionaries or encyclopedias.

The size of each download is displayed on the second page, ranging from less than 100 Megabytes to Gigabytes of data. A click on Download opens a new screen where the installation directory is selected. You can enable image integration which usually increases the size of the download significantly.

The download is then added to the install group on the left sidebar. Already installed Wikis are displayed under the local group.

Installation depends largely on the size of the selected Wiki, and the Internet connection. A progress bar is shown during installation. You can install multiple Wikis at once, but you need to go back to the selection screen after each item that you have added. An option to select multiple Wikis at once would have been handy. The program seems to look up occasionally during installation.

It is usually easier to download the Wikis as torrents. You only need to double-click the downloaded file to add it to the program database, at least that’s the case under Windows.

You can use Wikipedia as you would online once installed, with the exception of account and website related features. You can search Wikipedia for entries, navigate the pages or click on links to be taken to other pages, all without Internet connection

The search is limited to a single Wiki, which you have to select before you begin the search. That’s another aspect that could be better.

The software is generally responsive, but feels heavy at times, especially during installation of Wikis.

Okawix nevertheless makes it relatively easy to download Wikipedia to a local computer system. Interested users find downloads, torrents and documentation on the developer website.

At the moment though the site reaches its tenth anniversary at a difficult time where it is trying to find a way to move forward.  Every page you visit on the site has an appeal from Wales for donations and a great many people are criticising it for being too complicated for most people to edit.

The site has aims to increase its readers to 1bn by 2015 but they have a lot of work to do first to get there.  If you want to create or edit a Wikipedia article it’s like wading through old HTML treacle to do so.  The site needs a new WYSWIG editor quickly if its to remain popular.

That said there really is nothing to challenge it and, while the site might be off-limits in academia, there can be no doubting that everybody has heard about it.

So, happy anniversary Wikipedia, congratulations on a very successful 10 years so far and we look forward to what you give us in the next 10.

This is not the first website to be blocked in Pakistan.  Facebook was previously blocked due to…

 ”a row over a competition involving caricatures of Prophet Muhammad”

The Pakistani government has issued instructions to all the countries Internet service providers, instructing them to block access to the popular video website with immediate effect.

It is also being reported that some pages on Wikipedia are also being blocked.

Internet censorship, especially in democratic countries such as Australia and Pakistan will inevitably come under increasing scrutiny in the coming years after the United Nations’ recent announcement that unrestricted Internet access should be considered a “basic human right”.  The UN has yet to issue a statement, though we can assume that private discussions may well be taking place between Pakistani and UN officials in New York or Geneva.

So what does this mean for freedom on speech and freedom of expression?  I don’t believe anybody should get too concerned about countries such as Australia and Pakistan censoring certain websites over religious or adult content sensibilities at the moment.  The Internet is such a vast, and completely free (some would even say anarchistic) wonderland, that all countries around the world, including the US and western Europe, are still trying to figure out how this all fits in with their own privacy, copyright and defamation laws.

The time is coming though for the United Nations to set out what is and is not acceptable on the Internet.  This will give countries guidelines for blocking content that other people will consider perfectly acceptable.

Wikipedia gadgets can be accessed by clicking on the my preferences link in the top navigation of Wikipedia after logging in. These gadgets are only available to logged in users which is somewhat of a disappointment as some are useful for nearly every Wikipedia visitor.

The my preferences page displays all preferences of the online encyclopedia divided into tabs. A click on the gadgets tab will display all available gadgets to the logged in user. Gadgets are divided into the five categories browsing gadgets, editing gadgets, user interface gadgets, user interface gadgets for editing and library and compatibility gadgets.

Most interesting to non-editors are the browsing and user interface gadgets that are available.

Browsing gadgets

• GoogleTrans, opens a translation popup for the selected text or the word under the cursor when pushing the shift button
• Navigation popups, article previews and editing functions popup when hovering over links

Editing gadgets

• Add a sidebar menu of user-defined regex tools, with a dynamic form for instant one-use regex.
• Friendly, a set of tools for Firefox, Safari, and Opera that automates some of Wikipedia’s more friendly, collaboration oriented tasks, such as welcoming new users.
• HotCat, easily add / remove / change a category on a page, with name suggestion
• refTools, adds a “cite” button to the editing toolbar for quick and easy addition of commonly used citation templates.
• Twinkle, a set of tools for Firefox, Safari, and Opera that automates common tasks such as reporting vandalism, warning vandals, and requesting deletion.
• wikEd, a full-featured integrated text editor for Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome. Please read the help page for usage instructions.

User interface gadgets

• Add a “*” tab to the top of the page, which purges the page’s cache when followed.
• Add a clock in the personal toolbar that displays the current time in UTC (which also provides a link to purge the current page).
• Add a selector to the Wikipedia search page allowing the use of external search engines.
• Add mwEmbed support for video playback, Firefogg uploading and the “Add-Media-Wizard”. (These components are still evolving; you can help by providing feedback and bug reports on the respective talk pages.)
• Add page and user options to drop-down menus on the toolbar. Works in Monobook and Modern skins.
• After rolling back an edit, automatically open the contributions of the user rolled back.
• Allow /16 and /24 – /32 CIDR ranges on Special:Contributions forms (uses API), as well as wildcard prefix searches, e.g., “Splark*”.
• Change the location of the category box to place categories above all other content (MonoBook skin).
• Change the “new section” tab text to instead display the much narrower “+”.
• Change UTC-based times and dates, such as those used in signatures, to be relative to local time.
• Disable access keys
• Display an assessment of an article’s quality as part of the page header for each article.
• Focus the cursor in the search bar on loading the Main Page.
• Open external links in a new tab/window
• Use a black background with green text on the Monobook skin

User interface gadgets: editing

• Add an [edit] link for the lead section of a page
• Allow up to 50 more characters in each of your edit summaries. Works in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera.
• Make text fields (e.g. the edit form) use a sans-serif font instead of a monospace font.
• Moves edit links next to the section headers

Library and compatibility gadgets

• Compatibility function to run scripts only tested on Monobook on the new Modern skin. Required for using Twinkle or Friendly (along with many other scripts) with the Modern skin.
• DejaVu Sans, a font with support for various dingbats. This gadget works on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox 3.5, and Safari. Install this gadget if you need better font and character support but cannot install fonts directly onto your computer.
• The JavaScript Standard Library, a compatibility library for browsers that lack full support for JavaScript 1.6. This includes Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari 2

.

The navigation popups for instance display footnote information directly in a popup when hovering over a footnote on Wikipedia.

Some gadgets only work when a specific skin or web browser is being used. These restrictions are always mentioned in the gadget’s description. Gadgets can extend Wikipedia. Most gadgets are only useful for Wikipedia editors but the ones above and a handful of others are also useful for Wikipedia users.

The extension places an icon in the Google Chrome address bar which opens the Wikipedia browser on the active page. The cursor is automatically placed in the search form on top. A search will display the contents of the article in the browser window. All links are loaded in that window as well so that it is possible to load multiple articles directly in the window.

Basic controls at the top of the window can be used to go back and forth, clear the browsing history and to open the active Wikipedia page in a new tab in the browser.

The options of the extension can be accessed by right-clicking the icon in the address bar. Here it is possible to configure the primary and secondary languages, browser window width (normal and wide) and if featured articles should be displayed on the start page of the extension.

Wikipedia Companion is a handy extension for Google Chrome users who work with Wikipedia regularly. The extension can be downloaded from the Google Chrome extensions gallery.

Every Wikipedia user who creates an account and switches from the standard interface to the beta interface can create books from Wikipedia articles that are then offered as pdf and Open Document Text documents or for a modest price as printed books.

The following guide explains how to create a Wikipedia book directly on Wikipedia.

Start by creating an account at Wikipedia. The account creation takes less than a minute and requires no email address or verification. Now switch from the standard interface to the beta interface. This enables the beta features of which we will select the book creator.

This displays a small control bar on top of every Wikipedia page that can be used to add the current page to the book, show the book and its pages or to get page suggestions from Wikipedia.

Every internal link will also display an option to add the page to the book. The option appears after hovering the mouse over the link for a short time.

A book can contain a maximum of 100 Wikipedia pages which – obviously – translates to a very large book considering that most Wikipedia page consist of a lot of information, images and footnotes.

The Manage your book page displays all the Wikipedia articles that have been added to the current book. It is possible to create chapters and sort the articles before the book is downloaded as pdf or Open Document Text or ordered as a printed book at PediaPress. An example book that I have created had a size of more than 55 Megabytes and 477 pages. Ordering a print copy of the book would have cost less than €20.

Wikipedia has created a help page that describes the functionality in detail. There are also options to edit the standard template.

All pdf books created this way are available under the Creative Commons License. The books are furthermore stored in the user directory so that they can be edited at anytime. (via Labnol)

Wikipedia is on the other hand a rather messy site with lots and lots of links, menus and information that are often not related to the topic the user is researching.

Userscripts are small scripts that change the information that are displayed on a website they have been configured for. They can change, remove or add information to those pages. Userscripts are supported natively by the Google Chrome browser. Firefox users need to install the Greasemonkey extension first. Opera users might want to take a look at Greasemonkey in Opera and Internet Explorer users at the plugin Trixie.

Simplepedia – If you think that Wikipedia is to crowded and filled with unrelated information then Simplepedia is for you. The userscript removes much of the excess on the pages turning Wikipedia into a simple but effective information powerhouse. The starting page has been redesigned to only provide access to a search form, much like Google does with Google Search.

The individual pages on Wikipedia have also been redesigned. Away with all the information in the header and sidebar. Only the relevant information, a search form and the footer information are displayed so that it becomes much easier to access the information on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia Inline Article Viewer – Wikipedia uses a keyword listing to link to other articles on their website automatically. This can accumulate to hundreds of links on a single page that lead to other Wikipedia entries. A click on a link normally loads the new page in the same browser tab. Some users might prefer to access the information directly instead.

That is what the Wikipedia Inline Article Viewer helps with. It will display the linked articles in an iframe on the same site making it possible to browser the linked page without leaving the current one.

Multi-column articles – Wikipedia provides access to a printable version of all articles hosted on the site. The printable version is not optimized. The multi-column articles userscript has been designed to change that. It turns printable Wikipedia pages into a multi-column layout so that the printout is optimized. Some users might even prefer to read the articles in that mode as it resembles the design of newspapers. The extension is not working in Google Chrome currently but a port seems to be in the making.

wikiEd – Most Wikipedia articles can be edited by anyone. Wikipedia displays an edit page with some basic text editing controls at the top. Most of the editing has to be done manually though. WikiEd adds more controls to the top of the edit article window at Wikipedia. Some of the features that are added are syntax highlighting, search and replace operations with regular expression support, following links from the edit area, fullscreen text editing and pasting formatted text into the editor.

Wikipedia Clean and Professional – If Simplepedia was simply overkill in your eyes you might want to check out this userscript which does change the layout of Wikipedia encyclopedia articles as well. It gets rid of most navigational elements as well but uses a different layout and design to present the articles to the user.

Wikipedia Large Images – Most articles on Wikipedia contain images that are usually displayed as thumbnails. A click on an image will load an extra page where it is shown in full size. The Wikipedia Large Images userscript displays a larger version of the image when the user hovers the mouse over the image on the Wikipedia page which effectively means that it is no longer necessary to visit the image pages to get a closer look.

Google in Wikipedia – The name of this userscript is a bit misleading. It adds links to searches on other Internet sites at the top of the Wikipedia page. This includes Google Image search, IMDB, eBay, Video and Music searches.

Secure Wiki – Makes sure that a https connection is used to access Wikipedia and its sister sites. This can be helpful when users log into Wikipedia to edit pages. It is also possible to open the https connections manually but this userscript makes sure that it will never be forgotten.

Wikipedia cursor2input! – Wikipedia places the cursor on the page in the search text field on its main page only. This is not the default behavior on article pages. This userscript places the cursor on Wikipedia article pages in the search form as well so that it becomes possible to type the search phrase right away.

Wikipedia Printable Version – The printable pages of Wikipedia articles display only the contents of the article and no navigational elements. This userscript redirects every Wikipedia page to their printable page which is handy for users who usually print Wikipedia pages and users who prefer a distraction free experience.

Are you a Wikipedia regular? Have you found other userscripts, browser add-ons or bookmarklets to improve the online encyclopedia? Let us know in the comments.

The most notable difference becomes apparent on the start page of Powerset. Here it is not only possible to enter specific keywords like Google Chrome or Microsoft but also questions like “what did Benjamin Franklin invent” or phrases like “impressionist painters”. Wikipedia will return a list of possible results for those queries leaving the user with the task to look through them to find the article containing the right information.

The results pages that Powerset generates are also distinctively different from Wikipedia pages.Take Caffeine for an example. Wikipedia displays one extensive article about Caffeine that is divided into subsections.

Powerset on the other hand begins by displaying the most relevant information about Caffeine (and possible related meanings) at the top. Even more interesting than that is the so called Factz section which are information compiled from various Wikipedia articles. These factz are made up of the subject, a relation and an object and are listed in rows. For Caffeine its Caffeine (subject) Increases (relation) production effectiveness .. (object) in the first row and Caffeine Causes anxiety .. in the second with a total of 183 rows that can be displayed.

These sets can be selected for detailed information about the specific set by displaying relevant Wikipedia articles and information. Take a look at the demonstration video below for additional information:

Interested users can visit the Powerset website to test the services.

Here is how the Firefox add-on works. Wikilook offers several methods of looking up words on web pages. The unobtrusive approach works by pressing the shift key and moving the mouse over a word that needs to be looked up in a dictionary.

This will automatically open a small popup window next to the word or phrase that should be looked up in the dictionary. The word definition will stay on the screen until the left mouse button is pressed by the user which closes the popup window.

Word phrases can also be looked up in dictionaries. This is done by selecting the phrase with the left-mouse button before pressing shift and holding the mouse cursor over the phrase. This will then look up the selected phrase in the dictionary. It is possible to follow links that are displayed in the dictionary popup window. A left-click would open the page in the same tab. A middle-click or pressing Ctrl while left-clicking will open the link in a new tab instead.

WikiLook can also look up words in Wikipedia and Uncyclopedia. These look ups are initiated by pressing the Ctrl or Alt keys and right-clicking on a word or phrase that should be looked up. These functionality did not work properly on our Windows XP test system with Firefox 3.5.2 installed. It could be that another Firefox add-on interfered with this option though. If any of you who install the add-on can get this to work let us know.

The English pages of Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Uncyclopedia are used by default. Users who want to access dictionary definitions in other languages can change the English pages in the options easily to other language pages. The add-on comes with advanced settings that can only be accessed in the about:config menu. Easiest way to do so is to filter for wikilook in the configuration menu.

Most of the configuration settings define aspects of the popup window that is displaying the dictionary definitions.

Wikilook provides one of the most unobtrusive ways of looking up words in dictionaries saving users who do so regularly lots of time.

Okawix now offers a solution to download the full Wikipedia archive (and the archives of all sister sites) to the local computer system. The software offers its own web browser that can be used to navigate the websites normally once they have been downloaded to the local hard drive. This is an excellent solution for situations where no online connection is available.

The software program displays all supported languages in its interface on the first startup. The user can then select one or multiple languages to download contents in these languages. Okawix will then display the available Wiki websites and their size. Included are Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikipedia, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity and Wiktionary. The size of each download ranges from a few Megabytes to astronomical 6 Gigabytes for the English Wikipedia website.

A click on the download link beneath each entry will initiate the download of that database to the local computer system.

Okawix will ask the user to select a path for the download which can be saved so that it will be automatically picked for additional downloads. Images can be downloaded optionally. This will increase the size of the download.

The main interface of Okawix will then display the downloaded Wiki websites in the left sidebar offering a search engine and web browser. There are also options to print a page and find words in the page.

Okawix provides an easy way to download Wiki websites to a local computer system. The integrated web browser is responsive enough to offer a great offline working experience. It would be nice if the developers would add an option to automatically update the downloaded contents with new content that has been added to Wiki websites. Okawix is available for Windows, Linux and Mac.

via Instant Fundas

One of the first things to come out of the Usability Project was a new skin. Wikipedia currently uses a skin called Monobook and has done so for over five years. Since Monobook was chosen, design trends have changed, as have web browsers and the way in which we surf.

The skin, called Vector, makes a number of changes. Vector gives the searchbar a more prominent location, declutters pages and looks much more modern. Basically, it makes it much easier to browse Wikipedia.

Registered users can choose a variety of skins and ‘gadgets’.

To enable the Vector skin, registered users need only go to the ‘Appearance’ tab in the ‘My Preferences‘ page and select Vector.

The usability project has many other plans, and aims to make editing more accessible. This is just a first step, but in my opinion still a marked difference.

Google Unified Search is a very interesting search add-on for the Firefox web browser. You might have read about add-ons that combine Google search results with those of other search engines such as Bing or Wolfram Alpha. Google Unified Search takes that concept a step further by integrating multiple search engines in Google results. It adds support for Bing, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, Stumbleupon and Delicious in the Google search results.

Search results of one search engine besides Google Search are displayed at a time but it is possible to switch to the results of another one without having to reload the page. By default Google search results and Bing search results are displayed in the interface. A control in the top right corner makes it possible to switch the alternative search engine to another one.

A left click on a search result in the Google column will open the website as usual. A click on a result in the alternative search engine on the other hand will open the result just in the area of that search engine. Users who want to open the website normally will have to open it in a new tab or window instead.

Google Unified Search is an excellent way of displaying additional information about a search term in the Google search results.

Deletionpedia provides a mirror of these deleted pages so that they can still be accessed by interested users. The website offers for example pages like “2008 United States presidential election controversies and attacks”, “Elvis Sightings” or a “list of female basketball players”. Searching for some of the phrases on Wikipedia will lead the visitor to a more general page that covers the topic. A search for “Blood Angels” will for example open the Space Marines (Warhammer 40,000) on Wikipedia while Deletionpedia still offers the original Blood Angels Wikipedia entry.

Most Deletionpedia pages contain links to the deletion discussion on Wikipedia which can shed some light on the deletion motives. Some pages contain additional information that the page is going to be transferred to another Wiki in the future.

Deletionpedia is an interesting project that currently hosts more than 60.000 Wikipedia pages that have been deleted. Interested users can browse Deletionpedia by various parameters including date of deletion, by number of revisions or editors.

Wikipedia has enabled the ‘Book’ extension to MediaWiki, the content management system it utilises. This adds a ‘add page’ link to every page, allowing users to compile a book. This book can then be sorted by the user into chapters. Afterwards, it can be shared with other Wikipedians. Currently, only logged-in users can utilise this tool.

Wikipedia has a built-in rendering engine which will grabs the pages, fetches the images and parses them before they are given to the user as a PDF or OpenDocument text. The user can also use PediaPress to have the book professionally bound and printed.

The ‘Book’ extension has a number of features for ‘expert’ users. For example, the user can elect to only include a certain version of an article. This could pose useful if the article being covered has reached ‘Featured’ or ‘Good’ quality, as they are sure information in the version which reached that standard is reliable and accurate.

Books can be made on any topic, or combinations of topics, on Wikipedia (or other projects with have enabled this extension, such as Wikibooks). There are some restrictions on what can be printed, as PediaPress are based in Germany so German law applies.

It is an amazing display of quite how big Wikipedia is. I made a book about the European Union, comprising about 45 articles, and when I sent it to PediaPress, it totalled a massive 2444 pages (3 volumes!). I shan’t be buying this, as it will cost me about €80! Prices for smaller books start at $8.90 for 100 pages. A fraction of this is donated to the Wikimedia Foundation. These books are black and white and measure 8″ x 5.5″ (about 20cmx14cm).

The books (from the preview I’ve seen) and the PDFs are well laid out. The PDFs are all selectable and are easy to navigate. It also contains links to the images’ pages. Amusingly, to maintain GFDL compatibility every editor to the article has to be mentioned! I, for example, are credited for writing a minute amount of the article on the Czech Republic.

I question how popular this will be though; as convenient as books may be, I would imagine institutions like schools would rather buy published textbooks than volunteer made ones.

It is worth emphasising that Wikibooks contains resources written as textbook entries, rather than articles. Perhaps that will be a practical application of PediaPress and this new move.

More information is available on the Wikpedia help page.

TechCrunch has also covered this story, but I simply found it through browsing Wikipedia!

The results are shown pretty fast, it usually took less than a second for them to be displayed on the page. The Firefox add-on makes use of three different keyboard and mouse shortcuts. Pressing Shift and clicking the right-mouse button will look up the selected word in Wiktionary, while Ctrl and the right-mouse button will look it up in Wikipedia. The last shortcut can be used to open the quick search dialog. The shortcuts can be customized which might be necessary depending on other add-ons installed on the computer.

QuickWiki is an experimental Firefox add-on. This means that it can only be downloaded and installed after logging into the Mozilla website. It has to be noted that the add-on is currently only working with the English language portals of both Wikipedia and Wiktionary.

The entry PHP will for instance display part of the Wikipedia article on the top of the results. A Youtube video will be shown on the right with the option to browse through all Youtube videos that are related to the search term.

Below that is probably the most interesting part of Visual Wikipedia: Related Terms. Related terms are terms that are related to the entered search term. They are shown as a tag cloud and mindmap. A click on a tag or an entry in the mindmap will load search for that term on Visual Wikipedia.

A box will all outgoing links of the Wikipedia article, recommended articles and links to different language versions is shown on the very same page as well.

Links to various external search engines are available at the bottom of the page. This includes links to Youtube, Wikipedia, Google or Flickr among others.

The main benefit of using Visual Wikipedia as opposed to the normal Wikipedia website is the additional display of information on the result pages.

The most useful tool to improve the browsing of Wikipedia has to be Navigational Pop-Ups. This is a Wikipedia userscript which allows the user to preview an article by hovering their mouse over a link to it; the userscript provides the first few paragraphs of an article as well as an image. The benefit of this is you can quickly understand a technical term linked to inside Wikipedia, preventing another tab from having to be opened. Popups provides a quick way for edits to be reverted (restored to a previous version). To install Popups, one must simply go to ‘Gadgets’ under ‘My Preferences’ whilst logged in and enable it.

The recent Wikipedia censorship controversy led to editors finding workarounds so they could continue to use Wikipedia. One way was to use Wikimedia’s SSL server to access Wikipedia, ensuring pages cannot be censored or edits recorded which obviously has benefits in environments like the workplace. The URL of the SSL server is https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/ (to use a different language/project, change Wikipedia to the other project, eg wikinews; or en to your language, eg de.

The Watchlist is another powerful tool built into Wikipedia. It allows you to select pages in which you have a special interest and a list is then generated of them with any edits to those pages being highlighted. To start watching a page, one must simply click ‘watch’ at the top of the page and to view it click ‘my watchlist’. Even if you don’t utilise it to monitor changes, it can act as a bookmarking tool for Wikipedia!

Directed Edge Encyclopedia is a website based on Wikipedia which adds ‘related articles’ to articles; useful to get background knowledge on a topic! One can include these in Wikipedia by going to their monobook.js page whilst logged in, pressing ‘edit’ and pasting the following:


document.write('<script type="text/javascript" src="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Scott.wheeler/relatedarticles.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript"></script>');


A list of other cool scripts which can be installed is listed here.