7 Free WikiPedia iPhone Apps Compared

Having an iPhone and thus Internet access everywhere is an amazing thing. Being able to look up things you need to know instantly where ever you are is probably the best thing about it. And most things are looked up in the WikiPedia of course.

So it's no wonder that there are a number of tools promising to make reading the WikiPedia on your iPhone faster and more comfortable. I found seven different free¹⁾ applications and there are a few non-free ones as well.

I was curious how those apps would differ and downloaded all the free ones. Let's start with a feature Matrix before digging into each application a bit deeper.

	Wapedia	Wikipanion	Eureka	Wikiamo	Quickpedia	Qwikipedia	WikiTap
Language Select	prefs	search	multiple	search	english	english	english
Auto Completion
Fulltext Search			²⁾
Search in Article
Nearby Search³⁾
TOC Navigation⁴⁾					⁵⁾		⁶⁾
View History⁷⁾
Used Font	sans serif	selectable	sans serif	sans serif	sans serif	serif	sans serif
Custom Font Size
Bookmarks
Landscape Mode
Open in Safari							⁸⁾
Share via Email
Mainpage⁹⁾
Featured Article
Random Article			¹⁰⁾	¹¹⁾
Audio Support¹²⁾					¹³⁾
Preference Panel¹⁴⁾
Offline Mode¹⁵⁾
	Wapedia	Wikipanion	Eureka	Wikiamo	Quickpedia	Qwikipedia	WikiTap

Notes

Wapedia accesses a mobile optimized (cached) version of Wikipedia. It paginates long articles. Menus buggy in landscape mode

Wikipanion can also search Google Definitions and Wiktionary. The only app with working audio support.

Eureka does not follow redirects, but displays a info page with link instead. Choosing “translate” from the menu crashes the app.

Wikiamo looks nearly identical to Eureka but has fewer features

Quickpedia can display current news and popular Articles from Wikipedia. The interface is a bit unusal in a bad way. The only app with location based search.

Qwikipedia is just a wrapper around Safari. Nearly no features. The original Wikipedia page layout is briefly shown before the page is loaded fully.

WikiTap allows users to attach photos (from the iPhone) and Videos (looked up at YouTube) to Wikipedia articles (only in the app, not uploaded to Wikipedia) . It accesses a cached (and often outdated) version of Wikipedia by default when switching to “Wiki mode” many features are disabled.

Screenshots

Summary

All those apps will display a WikiPedia article without the navigation menu and somewhat reformatted for the small screen. But they also take away two important features of a wiki: they will not give you access to older article revisions and you can not edit the articles. The first is especially bad when the current revision was vandalized. However some apps allow you to open the article in Safari, giving you access to the full WikiPedia interface when needed.

My favorites are Wikipanion and Eureka. While the former has more features like Audio support, Google and Wiktionary search, the latter excels with it's ability to search multiple languages at once. Unfortunately neither of them supports location aware searching for articles covering nearby sights.

Tags:: iphone,; apps,; comparison,; wikipedia,; software,; review

Similar posts:

¹⁾ as in beer

²⁾ via Google

³⁾ displaying WikiPedia articles based on your current location

⁴⁾ giving you an iPhone UI for jumping to a subsection of the article

⁵⁾ but it collapses sections

⁶⁾ for cached version only

⁷⁾ a list of previously viewed articles

⁸⁾ embedded

⁹⁾ Shortcut to access WikiPedia's homepage

¹⁰⁾ shake the phone

¹¹⁾ by menu or shaking the phone

¹²⁾ Tested with .ogg file at Lojban article

¹³⁾ trying froze the application, needing an iPhone reboot

¹⁴⁾ Can the App be configured in the iPhone preferences

¹⁵⁾ Viewing a previously cached article again while in flight mode. Note: none of the apps caches images.

Posted on Friday, December the 12th 2008 (14 months ago).

Having and iPhone -> Having an iPhone

2008-12-12 21:00:12

Bernabé García

*sigh* no matter how often I read the posts before publishing, there's always a stupid error like this slipping through. fixed.

2008-12-12 21:21:48

Andi

I was asked what I didn't like about the Quickpedia interface by one of its developers. I guess I could have made that a bit more clear in the article. So I try to sum it up here.

The large "Options" bar at the top of each article looks very out of place and takes about 1/5 of the initial article view. That could have been handled better as a button in the top menu bar.

The collapsed view of sections is a nice idea, but only helps with navigating on the first section level. On longer articles with deep nested sections you still have to scroll a lot. I prefer the separate iPhone UI based TOC menus other apps use.

Popular, News and Nearby lists are formatted completely different. I understand that there is different information to present, but some consistency would have been nice.

Otherwise Quickpedia isn't too bad. Especially the nearby feature is great. Featurewise I miss multi language support most.

2008-12-14 23:33:26

Andi

Great Comparison of apps! Thanks for taking the time out to compile:)

2009-01-21 22:25:57

Brodie Beta

Andreas,

Super helpful resource. We've compiled your initial data in a grid - so the community can help keep it updated.

Thanks!

http://grydz.com/grid/show/fre … phone-apps

2009-04-11 00:53:30

Darren Rush

Hi, I found Handy Wiki (http://lazyapps.com/handywiki ) is so simple and elegant, and what's important, it's very suitable for reading such long article on a small screen device such as iPhone! Why not give it a try!

2009-10-20 04:47:27

jet

What software do you recommend to create wiki or hypertext in the iphone, and later export to the web? Is there something like windows' OneNote or better?

Thanks!

2010-02-03 03:52:44

Manoel