Wikibot — A Wikipedia Articles Reader 9+

Wikibot is a fantastic app, however, the wikipedia site changes constatnly, resulting in frequent breakages of the app. However, when something goes wrong the developers have reliably patched the incompatibility within a few weeks time. The app itself is great, presenting wikipedia in a beautiful, straightfowrad manner, that makes wikipedia feel more like a living, breathing encyclopedia than a website. There’s added functionality too- the sidebar adds a read later feature, as well as pulling the contents table out of the article and into it’s own space, drastically reducing clutter. Wikibot is a great app- but through no fault of the developers, there will be a few bumps down the road as wikipedia makes drastic changes to it’s site with no warning from time to time. However, for someone looking for an app that puts the content from the world’s largest information source front and center, there’s no competition- just be prepared to ride that trolley straight down the line.

I got this program because I had too many Wikipedia tabs continually cluttering up my web browsers. Offloading these into a separate Wikipedia-reading program has been quite helpful.

As the name suggests, Wikibot is a Wikipedia reader. Don’t expect functionality beyond viewing Wikipedia articles, although, as the feature list indicates, Wikibot does this in some fancy ways. I haven’t found a similar application that comes close to Wikibot on OS X. (I’ve also tried Wikipanion Plus and Articles for the iPad, and there I think Wikipanion Plus has the edge over Wikibot.) However, images are broken under Yosemite, and there is no way to export your bookmarks. This became a problem when I switched computers; I wanted to set up the new one manually to avoid the accumulated cruft that dominated my old drive, and I couldn’t even locate the Wikibot bookmarks file. I wound up re-bookmarking everything manually.

Worringly, this application seems to have been abandoned by its developers. The company website link and the “reader support” link from the app store are both broken, the Avocado Hills Twitter feed hasn’t posted anything since May 2013, the program itself hasn’t seen an update in over a year, and Wikibot 2 is only available for the iPhone and iPad.

I’m pre-med right now and was in need of some quick simple reference searches for everything from quick refreshment to curiosity. This app certainly does the trick. Simple additives make this app something I continually come back to.

Only downside, which I hope is fixed, is the photo/JPG etc viewer. Photos are generally disproportionate and not always easy to see. Resizing and scaling is worthless. This is not a huge issue for me though. At least not yet.