Knowledge

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10 Awesome Tools To Get More Out of Wikipedia

Posted: 16 Jun 2009 05:11 AM PDT

Wikipedia is an ocean of information. While you may still want to seek secondary information sources before trusting it entirely, you cannot argue that the site contains a plethora of useful information.

That said, it's tough to navigate through so much data. You can get much more out of it in less time if you decide to ditch the conventional way of using the built-in Wikipedia search for scouring through the information. The following ten tools will help you search and use Wikipedia like never before. I am sure you'll love using some of them.

Navify
Navify is an excellent web service which shows a lot of additional information related to a Wikipedia article like related images, videos and articles.

So if you are searching for Barack Obama, you can see the Wikipedia article on him, his photos, and the Youtube videos of his speeches, all on one page. Hence it can be used as a good research tool.

Powerset
Powerset is a Wikipedia search engine which certainly produces much better results than Wikipedia's in-built search. It finds keywords related to your search term and also displays various articles and categories which could be relevant to your query.

AgainButSlower
AgainButSlower is an innovative tool which modifies Wikipedia articles to make them simpler and easier to understand. So if you are looking to gain some knowledge about "Quantum Mechanics " and the Wikipedia article looks intimidating with all the heavy scientific terms, then AgainButSlower can help you. In fact just try that term. You'll find it to be really cool.

VisWiki
VisWiki (formerly Visual Wikipedia) is one of my personal favorites. It is an incredible tool which can take your online research to new levels. Not only it pulls up extensive information about your query but also produces interactive maps showing connection between articles and terms which is really awesome.

Lexisum
Need a quick and uncluttered print out of a Wikipedia article ? Lexisum will help you do that. It displays print-friendly Wikipedia summaries which can be easily formatted and adjusted according to your printer settings.

PedioPhon
Another innovative and useful site. PedioPhon converts Wikipedia articles to mp3 recordings. So next time you feel like listening to something from Wikipedia while jogging then you know what to do.

Snapask
Snapask delivers Wikipedia articles to your cellphone via email. Just send an email to ask@snapask.com with the corresponding command in the subject line and you'll receive the information in 30 seconds.

Similpedia
Similpedia provides a new way to search Wikipedia. Instead of typing search terms, it asks you enter a url or a paragraph of text of at least 100 words and then it displays relevant Wikipedia articles related to that text.

Wikirank
Would you like to know which are the most read articles on Wikipedia and the trending articles in last 30 days ? Wikirank will show you. As I write this, the Beatles seem to dominate the scene. :)

DeletionPedia
And finally, if the current article database in Wikipedia can't satiate your hunger for information then you can browse through DeletionPedia, an archive for deleted Wikipedia articles. You might come across some interesting articles there.

Hope you like the tools. If you know of some other such cool Wikipedia tools then lets hear about them in the comments.

Cheers,

Abhijeet

Written on 6/16/2009 by Abhijeet Mukherjee. Abhijeet is an internet entrepreneur who loves writing about tech, productivity, blogging & making money online. Catch him at Jeet Blog and also subscribe to his weekly newsletter.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia