Love it or hate it, Wikipedia is a valuable resource of useful information. It may be argued if the information provided is reliable (as it is added by non-experts), but what is for sure, the site stores the huge volume of data which is discusses, edited and moderated to ensure it provides value.

Another great thing about Wikipedia is that it has a great number of possible implications due to its clear “inter-linked” structure and high popularity. So, let’s have a look at various tools that make Wikipedia even more useful and “usable”.

Wikipedia Search Engines:

PowerSet is Wikipedia search engine applying its natural language processing to search. In fact, using it often saves me from the trouble to open Wikipedia pages. It offers FireFox search plugin for quicker access.

The application answers questions quite accurately. Besides, for each query the tool collects so-called “Factz”, i.e. related concepts and topics. For example, searching for ‘brand’ returns the following “Factz”:

Brand:

includes :

Westhroid, Naturethroid, Armour, Nesquik, Dinkum, Crusha, foods, Tobacco, Oysters, uses : letters, infomercials, systems, commands, variation, spots, method and creators. appear on :

timetables, literature, product, gasoline, sides and ends.

Similpedia searched for similar stories on Wikipedia by URL or text. It is a great way to find which Wiki articles a page can associate with:

Cognition is Wikipedia linguistic meaning-based search engine that compares its search results with additional statistical pattern-matching search engines.

FireFox Addon

QuickWiki is a handy little addon that allows for a quick access to Wikipedia. Its handy shortcuts (which can be configured) include:

SHIFT + SPACE: to open the search window;

CTRL and right-click: to look up any word in Wikipedia:

Tools to Spot Hottest Articles:

Wikirage detects pages with highest number of edits. This basically means, with it you can find most questionable and controversial entries: popular people in the news, the latest fads, and the hottest video games, Internet memes, zietgeist, etc.

It allows you to filter results by date: find pages edited in the last hough, 6 hours, day, 3 days, week or month.

Similarly, Deletionpedia tracks pages deleted from Wikipedia. Like the above, it has a separate section for pages that were first heavily edited and only then deleted (“Pages deleted after more than 1000 days on Wikipedia”). It also features most recent and hottest phrases on the home page. Topics are sorted alphabetically.

Take Wikipedia Offline:

WikiTaxi is multilingual portable application that delivers the Wikipedia of your choice to wherever you go. WikiTaxi is up to date. It works with the original Wikipedia database dumps, which are updated regularly every few weeks or so. It requires no installation. All you will need to do is to extract the WikiTaxi archive to any folder. To uninstall, simply delete the executable file.

Pocket Wikipedia is another way to save Wikipedia on your computer, it is a hand-checked selection from Wikipedia which is about the size of a fifteen volume encyclopedia (24,000 images and 14 million words). It works on PocketPC, Windows and Linux systems.

Visualization tools:

Wikipedia-roll “accesses to a global vision of a subject through the definition and items of the article in Wikipedia.” It sorts the topic into concepts and sub-concepts, graphically representing the article.

For example, “Brand” topic is divided into following sections:

Key elements;

Concepts;

Branding approach;

See also;

History;

Bibliography:

VisWiki enhances each Wikipedia article with the “tree of related topics and subtopics:

EyePlorer developed by German company Vionto.com visualizes knowledge graphs (k-graphs) derived from Wikipedia content. Each k-graph consists of eyespots representing concepts that are connected to your topic. For better orientation those eyespots are clustered. If you want to know how any eyespot is connected to your topic, just click on it.

Statistics:

Wikipedia article traffic statistics: shows traffic stats for any Wiki article for any month. You can choose any month to see the stats for:

Wikirank trends any topic popularity on Wikipedia. It also offers handy as-you-type search suggestions.

You can compare popularity of several topics. What’s more, you can see most read articles for the last 30 days and currently trending topics (i.e. recent movers and shakers).

Post image by Jimbo Wales