12 Tips for Using Wikipedia Effectively
Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites in the world. We all know that many of the readers come to Wikipedia from time to time. Here are a few tricks that will help you more effectively find/use information from the free encyclopedia or just have a little fun.
It is difficult to find a person who would not know about this universal encyclopedia on the Internet, which is created by voluntary authors in many languages of the world and freely distributed on the Internet. People strive to get their Wikipedia pages from an expert or a Wikipedia Page Writing Service.
How to view a list of pages for nearby geographic features?
It is automatically generated on the “nearby” service page if you access it from a device on which location tracking is enabled. This list will help you learn more about the place where you are on a trip/business trip or understand what useful information about your home district is missing in the encyclopedia.
How to enable page preview by link?
Sometimes there are articles in which there are a lot of incomprehensible words. And if you go to each page, then the reading process is greatly delayed. To help solve the problem, tooltips that display part of the text of articles will help. The Firefox browser has a “WIKI 2” add-on for this and Chrome has the “Wikipedia Quick Hints” extension.
How do I know the number of times an article was viewed?
We open the necessary page, go to the History tab and then click on the Statistics of visits link. Here you can see not only the popularity of the current page but also compare it with others. This is another way to reliably measure the popularity of a brand or a famous person.
How to make a book for iBook from several articles?
Some Wikipedia articles are very long and complex. Together with related materials, their reading can take several hours. It is convenient to make a book out of one or several pages and read it on a tablet.
Here is an instruction on how to do this:
- On the selected page, click on the “Create book” link in the left menu.
- Click on the blue button “Run the book wizard”.
- The book master is launched and the first article is added to the book.
- Follow the link “Suggested pages” and add other articles interesting to you in the book.
- Click the “Show book” link, indicate its name, format, other parameters and click on the “Download” button.
- Download the file and Open it in iBook.
How to download Wikipedia to a computer for offline reading
To download the free encyclopedia sections to your hard drive there is a special service called Kiwix.
How to find pages that are similar to the given?
Using the “more like” statement. For example: more like: Stalin. Based on my experience of using the operator, I assume that the degree of similarity is measured in the number of identical words.
How to see yesterday’s version of the main page?
So that person who visits Wikipedia every day to broaden their horizons is not upset if they miss one day, you can watch yesterday’s version of the main page.
How do I know if a certain IP address is on the Wikipedia ban list?
If you are banned in the encyclopedia, then before registering a new account, you need to know the IP addresses that are on the blacklist so as not to ruin the new account from entering them. The list of blocked users and IP addresses is on a separate page.
Conclusion
These were a few Wikipedia interaction techniques that can be useful in certain situations. There are many more various tricks of using this site, but they are mostly intended for those who are actively writing articles for the encyclopedia. You can read about them in the help section of Wikipedia.