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 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.
Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.
He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.
