Indywiki: Visual browser for Wikipedia

Originally published on Linux.com

No matter what you think about the quality and nature of Wikipedia articles, there is no denying that the encyclopedia provides an immense knowledge repository full of exciting facts and information. And while you can quickly find an article about a particular topic using Wikipedia’s search capabilities, there are other ways to explore Wikipedia that break away from the traditional search box approach. Indywiki is a good example of a tool that tries to rethink the way we search and browse information in Wikipedia. Indywiki does have a search box, but that’s were the similarity with traditional search tools ends. Once you’ve found the article you’re looking for, you can continue to browse the related topics visually. To make this possible, Indywiki processes the current and related articles and extracts images from them. When you click on an image, Indywiki displays the article that the picture links to.

Figure 1: Indywiki

Indywiki is written in Python, and it depends on the python-qt4 package, which most Linux distros have in their repositories. Install the package using your Linux distro’s package manager, download the latest version of Indywiki, unpack the downloaded archive, and you are ready to go. To launch Indywiki, switch to its directory, and run the python indywiki.py command.

Indywiki sports a relatively simple GUI consisting of four major elements. At the top, there is a prominent pane that holds images extracted from Wikipedia articles. Unlike other Wikipedia browsers, Indywiki doesn’t simply display the article, but processes it and puts a list of article sections (which act as the article’s table of contents) into the Contents window and all the links found in the article into the Links window. This makes the articles more readable, but the drawback is that it modifies the original structure of the article by moving the links from the main article body. This problem could be easily solved by adding a button or a menu item, which opens the original article in Wikipedia. However, this feature is missing in the current version of the application.

To start using Indywiki, simply enter a search term into the Search box and press the Go button. Indywiki then finds the matching article, processes it, and fetches the images in it as well as in the related articles. You can then click on the hyperlinked sections in the Contents windows to jump to a particular part of the article. The Links window contains the links found in the current article, and you can perform a new search by simply clicking on the link you want. The only usability issue here is the lack of a feature that would allow the user to return to the previous article. For now, the only way to get back to the original article is to do a search again. Of course, the most interesting part of Indywiki is the image browser, which allows you to explore related articles by clicking on a thumbnail picture you find interesting or relevant. You can browse through the image gallery using the Next and Back buttons. If the image belongs to the currently displayed article, clicking on the picture opens the original image in a floating window. Besides providing an easy-to-use graphical navigation tool, the image browser adds a whole new dimension to your search since it often contains images linked to topics not directly mentioned in the current article. For example, the article about Tarsier returns pictures of Aye-aye, which is not listed in the Contents or the Links window.

Indywiki doesn’t offer any configuration options, but it does allow you to choose between different Wikipedia versions. By default, Indywiki uses the English version of Wikipedia, but you can easily switch to another language by choosing View → Choose Wikipedia site.

Indywiki does have a few quirks, but even in its current form it offers an interesting approach to exploring Wikipedia. While Indywiki may not necessarily increase your productivity, it makes it possible to discover interesting topics you might not have stumbled upon otherwise.

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