Wikipedia now has over three and a half million articles in it’s massive database and its something most of us use every day. Whether you’re checking who the actor in that movie you just saw was or learning stoichiometry (don’t worry, i’ll wait while you Google it), Wikipedia is one site that the Internet could not be without.
Now, I don’t know about you but I use my iPad a lot for casual browsing and Wikipedia is one of those sites I browse. Sure, Wikipedia in Safari is a great experience, but native apps almost always act superior to their web counterparts. Wikipedia has a wealth of unofficial iOS apps, some of which we’ve reviewed and one that we haven’t: Wikipanion.
Wikipanion doesn’t provide any gimmicky special Wikipedia experience like rearranging it into a magazine-style layout, it just browses the site. And it does that well.
Browsing Human Knowledge: One Article at a Time
The main view of Wikipanion is simple yet functional. It displays the article (sans Wikipedia housing) with a contents bar opposite. Selecting a title in the contents bar will make an animated skip to that relevant section. Everything you would recognise Wikipedia from (very other word linked, footnotes, etc.) all appear in the article view.
Via the three-button switch at the top of the sidebar, you can access the Related view. Here you can translate the article by jumping the source to another country’s native Wikipedia or view the other articles in a category the current article is placed in.
Wikipanion offers a native way of browsing Wikipedia's three-and-a-half million articles.
The third “mode” is the bookmarks view. This allows you to bookmark articles or pages so you can access them faster later. The process is very similar to adding a bookmark in the iPad’s native Safari.
Sharing is Caring
By selecting the cog icon on any article, a pop-up overlay appears. Here you can edit the text view by changing the font to serif or changing the font size. However, you can also search the article and lookup words in Wikipedia’s sister site Wiktionary.
However, you can also email a link to the page, open it in Safari, tweet the article and print it. Printing uses iOS’s new AirPrint feature whilst tweeting will, if you have it installed, use the official Twitter app (or at least it did for me). I assume if the app is not installed, you will be sent to the Twitter website.
Wikipanion offers numerous ways to share, print and search an article.
Wikipedia-ing On the Go
Sure the iPad is a “revolutionary” portable device but sometimes you’re out and about and you want to check up on something. Well, Wikipanion has an iPhone app too! Unfortunately, its not a universal binary (free or Plus version) meaning if you do pay the extra cost to gain additional features, you’ll have to do it twice to run on both devices.
On iPhone, the UI is more akin to Safari with most of the features located now on a bottom bar. However, the functionality of the app is pretty much the same on either device.
Wikipanion is fresh and alive on the iPhone too.
Right on Queue: Wikipanion Plus
The developer of Wikipanion, Robert Chin, also offers a “Wikipanion Plus” version at a $4.99 premium. One major feature of Plus is the queue mode that allows you to stack up articles for later viewing. For example, if you were a newcomer to Apple, you could stack up the iPhone, iPod, Mac and iPad articles in a row to view one after another. You can also save these articles to view them faster later or even have a browse whilst offline.
Saving pages creates a local cache of the links you’d like to read later. I’m sure most Wikipedia users have been on an article and whilst they’d like to continue reading it, one of those blue links calls out. In Plus, you can simply save this and have a look later on.
Conclusion
It’s hard to write a lot about this app because it’s one of these apps that does what it says on the tin, but not to it’s disadvantage. In fact, it’s simplicity and ease-of-use is very much to it’s advantage especially when you’re out and about.
As it’s mainly a free app, it’s not hard to recommend. There are many apps available to browse Wikimedia sites and if you want fast, easy browsing, Wikipanion could be for you. However, if you’re a heavy browser, Plus could help you out.
However, if you don’t want to pay the extra five dollars for local cache, an elegant solution already exists: create a book on the Wikipedia website and export as PDF. Then export it onto iBooks for easy, offline viewing later on.
If you’ve tried out Wikipanion on any platform or have another browser for everyone’s favourite online encyclopedia, drop a note in the comments and let us know!
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