Ten More Wikipedia Hacks

About a month ago I blogged about my 10 favorite Wikipedia “hacks.” (Some prefer I call these tips.) Here are 10 more I've unearthed since then...

1) Subscribe to The Wikipedia Signpost
Wikipedia's been in the news quite a lot lately. And since they're one of the most dominant forces in Internet-driven change, you may feel a need like I do to keep up with their latest developments. While it's easy to use Google News to create an RSS search feed, there's another resource that's worth reading: The Wikipedia Signpost. The Signpost is a community-written and community-edited newspaper that's published by Wikipedians. It covers events and stories related to the English Wikipedia. A new issue is published on Monday of each week. You can pull the feed here.

2) Tap Into the Power of Special Wikipedia Bookmarklets
There are a whole bunch of Wikipedia bookmarklets that you can add to your browser that are quite handy. I couldn't get these to work, but I am sure some javascript jockey will have no problem at all fixing these. However, if you scour the web you will find many more. For example, drag this one to your bookmark bar to make Wikipedia more readable.

3) Listen to the Audible Wikipedia
Many of Wikipedia's articles have been converted into spoken word format. You can find them here. The one catch is that they're in OGG format. There's a feed for this page too.

4) Download the Complete Wikipedia and Put it on Your Mobile Device
Erik Zachte offers a downloadable version of Wikipedia that you can access on many offline or web-enabled mobile devices, including Pocket PCs and Palms. It comes in TomeRaider format. You can find instructions on how to get the files and the updates on his Web site. Another alternative is Lexipedia, an abridged version.

5) Track Wikipedia's Importance to Google
How important is Wikipedia to Google? The answer is very. According to this page, there are 349 million Wikipedia pages in Google. In addition, as you can see from this table, Wikipedia references indexed in media stories on Google News are also rising dramatically.

6) Mash Up Wikipedia, Flickr with Wikr
BlinkBits has a cool tool called Wikr that pulls together a Wikipedia-Flickr mash on any topic in the open source encyclopedia. It can be accessed from any Web site with a bookmarklet. Just drag this link to your toolbar. Then highlight any word on a web page and click it. The result is a nice page like this that pulls together Wikipedia and Flickr results into a page that just also happens to have an RSS feed.

7) Track Wikipedia Articles with BlinkBits RSS Feed
While I am on the subject of BlinkBits. I should also point out that they are hosting RSS feeds for literally millions of Wikipedia articles. Just search for an article on Blinkbits Wikifeeds page and it will show you the way to your feed. For example, here's a feed you can use to track the ever popular podcasting article.

8) Juice Up Your Wikipedia Experience with Greasemonkey
I recently started using Greasemonkey and I don't know how I lived without it. Greasemonkey lets you download scripts that add functionality to Web pages that the publisher did not include. There are a bunch of Wikipedia Greasemonkey scripts. However, my favorite is the Wikipedia Inline Article Viewer. This script adds a button after all article links on Wikipedia pages which, when clicked, opens the article inline in a mini frame. Another script that's popular is AniWiki.

9) Unencyclopedia
If you ever get fed up with Wikipedia, check out Uncyclopedia - a parody site that's like Superman's Bizarro.

10) Download the Wikipedia Lookup Firefox Extension
Last but not least, if you're a huge Wikpedia fan, go download the special Firefox extension that makes lookups easier. It will even open results in your sidebar or a new tab.

Technorati Tags: Bookmarklets, Firefox, Greasemonkey, Hacks, Wikipedia

Comments

[Erik Zachte]

Thanks for blogging about my site.

I recently changed address in the real world and had to change provider as a result.

So finally made good on a regrettable early omission and registered a permanent web site.

So for tip 4 please use url

http://infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/Order.html

Best regards, Erik Zachte

[Mark J]

For those interested in Wikipedia RSS feeds, I host some other ones on my site: Picture of the Day, Featured Article of the Day and Recent Announcements.

[cinefilo]

Yeah, All days learn with this blog, it´s very interesant your hacks.

[Brent]

Hi Steve,

Great to hear you like my greasemonkey script (Wikipedia Inline Article Viewer). I happen to like it too. :)

I've recently updated it to work with the latest version of greasemonkey (it was broken on 0.6.4 for a few weeks).

-Brent

[Miles]

Tks for the mention of my wikr bookmarklet above...

I want to let you know I coded something similar (maybe even easier) for users of the new google toolbar... It is a
A custom toolbar button for Wikipedia. The button will let you get a preview and RSS Feed on any Wikipedia Article from anywhere.