By Ashwin Ananthapadmanabhan

The Best Wikipedia Tools and Resources

Your guide to some of the best Wikipedia tools, resources and hacks. Save Wikipedia articles as ebooks, find pages that are linking to you and more.

Since its launch in 2001, Wikipedians have created about 4.5 million articles on the English version of Wikipedia alone which is roughly equivalent to 2000+ print volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica. If you are also interested in becoming a contributor, follow the Wikipedia tutorial or get the Missing Manual which is available online for free.English Wikipedia Printed


Q: Can I download Wikipedia? Or maybe buy Wikipedia on a DVD just like Britannica?
You can download Wikipedia through Kiwix. It is a single zip file that’s also available via BitTorrent. A children’s charity group in UK has created a Wikipedia DVD with some 6000+ articles for school children that you can download at schools-wikipedia.org.
Q: How do I know which Wikipedia pages are linking to my website?
A: Open the Link Search tool on Wikipedia and type the address of your website. Always use a wildcard before the domain name to take care of both www and non-www links. For instance, a query like *.xyz.com will show all Wikipedia articles that link to the xyz.com site.
Q: How do I save Wikipedia pages as PDF ebooks?
A: You can use the book creator tool inside Wikipedia to create an ePUB or PDF ebook from one or more Wikipedia articles.
Q: Share me some cool tools and mashups built around Wikipedia?
A: Here’s an updated list:
  • stats.grok.se – Find the daily pageviews (traffic) of any article on Wikipedia.
  • Deletionpedia – this is an archive of pages that have been deleted from the main Wikipedia website.
  • Wikipedia Vision– See edits happening on Wikipedia from different parts of the world in near real-time.
  • User Edits – Get a list of all the deletes and edits made to a Wikipedia page by any particular user.
  • Wikimindmap – It creates mind map of any Wikipedia article with the various nodes pointing to other articles that are linked from the main article.
  • @CongressEdits – This is a Twitter bot that tweets anonynous edits made to Wikipedia from IP address in the US Congress.
  • Edit List – The list of most active Wikipedia users by the number of edits.
  • Count List – The list of most active Wikipedians by the number of articles created.
  • Wiki Blame– quickly find the author(s) of any specific passage of a Wikipedia article.
  • Wiki Checker – Get a list of all users who have edited a particular Wikipedia article.
  • User Contribution – See the contributions and edit history of any Wikipedia user.
  • Wikistream – Visualize the current editing activity on Wikipedia in realtime.
Q: I want to contribute to Wikipedia but the Wiki syntax is confusing.
A: You can write a document inside Microsoft Word and then use this extension to convert the Word Document into MediaWiki markup that Wikipedia can understand. Alternatively, you can write in HTML and use a convertor to transform the HTML tags into Wiki markup.
Q: I am looking for some free images for my website. Can I use images from Wikipedia without worrying about copyright?
A: It depends. Every image (or media) available on Wikipedia has an associated copyright tag which indicates the license of that file. This page has more information on reusing content outside Wikipedia.
Q: Does Wikipedia offer RSS feeds?
A: Every article on Wikipedia has an RSS feed though they aren’t obvious. Click the “History” tab on any Wikipedia page and you’ll find RSS icons in the left toolbox. See: How to Track Wikipedia Articles.
Q: Wikipedia is blocked in the country. Any workarounds?
A: Please read this guide on how to access blocked sites for reading Wikipedia through alternate routes.
Q. How should I create links to Wikipedia articles?
A: Wikipedia articles change with time. Therefore when you are linking to any Wikipedia page from your website, consider linking to the current snapshot of the page and not the main article. You can find the permalink (URL) to the page snapshot in the right sidebar as “Permanent Link.”

Popular posts from this blog

LOADING TIME OF YOUR WEBSITE

By Ashwin Ananthapadmanabhan
Image
CHECK LOADING TIME OF YOUR WEBSITE Now a day’s everyone is using Google to search their information. There are millions of websites are available in Google, each websites is with its own content.  When you search any information in Google, it will list the links, which is related to your topic. Each link is directed to some websites. While searching, the  user always  wants to load the websites very fast. Because now a days, in this  busy world no one has the patience. If the sites are loading slowly then the user may get tensed. So it may lead the people to get bore while using your website. If you are the blogger you should focus on your web page loading time. Loading time is very important goal to run a successful website.  So if you want to attract the visitors to your site you have to reduce the loading time of your website. Here are some websites to check your site loading speed freely. S...
Read more

Run ChatGPT-Like LLM Models offline on your PC

By Ashwin Ananthapadmanabhan
       Ever since ChatGPT hyped the use of AI, everyone wanted to try similar AI models on their devices for daily queries. These are powerful AI models capable of executing high-level tasks. Now with the help of customized tools, users can install various Large Language Models (LLMs) on their computers for offline use. If you want to make your computer an AI chat tool that you can access anytime you want, then the answer is the tool that allows users to install various AI models such as Llama 3, Phi 3, Falcon, Gemma, Replit, and more. Let’s now see the steps to get these tools and setup AI Models. M inimum Requirements: Apple Silicon Mac (M1/M2/M3) with macOS 13.6 or newer Windows / Linux PC with a processor that supports AVX2 (typically newer PCs) 16GB+ of RAM is recommended. For PCs, 6GB+ of VRAM is recommended NVIDIA/AMD GPUs supported Note: You can follow this guide for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. AI Models use a high amount of RAM, CPU, and GPU. I...
Read more

How To Watch Time-lapse In Google Earth: Largest Video On The Planet!

By Ashwin Ananthapadmanabhan
Image
It’s a good way to see the world. Representative image. Image by Greg Rakozy on Unsplashed      In the ‘biggest update to Google Earth since 2017,’ Google has added the new Time-lapse feature. Time-lapse in Google Earth combines 24 million satellite photos from the past 37 years to make a 4D interactive model. As the name suggests, the Google Earth Time-lapse feature lets you go through a time-lapse of how things have changed over the years.      Time-lapse in Google Earth consists of photos taken from 1984 to 2020, which equals 20 petabytes (1 Petabyte is one million gigabytes) of satellite images. Google took these pictures and stitched them into a 4.4 terapixel video. The company says that this entire video is equivalent to over 5 million 4K resolution videos. That said, Google is also calling Time-lapse on Google Earth the largest video on the planet.  In its blog  post , the company has also promised annual updates to Google Earth for the nex...
Read more