I love Wikipedia, if you need some information on just about anything then bets are that you will find it on Wikipedia. One of my colleagues this week said they were amazed to find that they were looking for “Redclaw distribution in Queensland Australia” and they found some info on Wikipedia. By the way Redclaw are a freshwater crayfish. But that is a side thing. The example is just how good Wikipedia is.

Now I love Wikipedia just the way it is. But I found this great site that adds just that little something to it’s usefulness and interactivity. PediaX adds AJAX technology to the pages that you view. This provides additional data and some very useful features. Not for everyone especially the loyalists but it does provide a different way to digest information and incorporates some good ideas.

Breifly the features. An optimized user interface that doesn’t look that different on the surface but closer inspection reveals things like a layout in the sidebar plus categories related to what you are looking at. The fact that these do not scroll makes it more accessible. Things that I really liked were the intuitive search based on articles. This makes suggestions based on inputted search data, articles available and the function to auto fill. Nice. But the thing that I found most useful was the link previews.

Link previewing gives you the beginning text of the linked article in a small box. The link description got in the way a bit but it is beta… I think that for things like the definition of a word this is great. You don’t have to open another window. Makes for speedy reading.

There is also some basic metrics that seem to be a bit on the “beta” side but interesting. I have talked about the things that I like and make reading and searching easier. Some I would like to see Wikipedia adopt, but I can’t see it. More on their about page.

If you are wondering the information is as up to date as can be as they use the data dumps directly from Wikipedia. Check it out and see if you find it useful. To get started type something in the “Suche” Box… I presume “search”. The map was freaking out when I visited so no screenshot

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 at 11:19 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.