Wikipedia Book Creator now supporting epub format

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Wikipedia Visual Editor Coming Soon

One of the biggest hurdles for new Wikipedia contributors is the editor that is currently offered on site. The editor is basically a plain text editor and authors have to learn the markup language to add, edit or delete information on Wikipedia pages. While it is often possible to use copy and paste for that, for instance to add a new link to a Wikipedia article, the syntax is often not that easy to cope with, especially if you plan on adding a new article to the site.

Howie Fung, Senior Product Manager, notes that there “is plenty of evidence that wiki-markup is a substantial barrier that prevents many people from contributing to Wikipedia and our other projects”.

That’s without doubt one of the core reasons why the Wikimedia Foundation has started to create a visual editor for Wikipedia. The editor is currently available as a developer prototype. The editor is nowhere near as robust to make it available for all Wikipedia editors just yet, but it shows some of the editor’s planned capabilities.

The developers have published a visual editor sandbox to provide all contributing and future editors with the opportunity to test the visual editor before it goes live on the site. When you open the editor sandbox, you see a single toolbar at the top and the article beneath. Everything on that page is editable.

The first half of the toolbar provides access to common editor options, like adding headings to the article, making text bold or adding links to it. The second half switches between different view modes. It is for instance possible to display a wikitext or json view mode next to the editor’s text. Strangely though, those view modes do not allow editing of contents.

The developers plan to add features and upgrade the editor to make it more robust before it goes live later this year on the site. A visual editor could increase the editor count on Wikipedia significantly. What’s your take on the move?

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About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Friday February 24, 2012 -
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Access Wikipedia Offline In Google Chrome

You may sometimes be in a position where you need to look up information but do not have Internet available at the moment. This can be during your daily commute or in a situation where an Internet connection is not available or working. We have reviewed several options in the past to get the majority of Wikipedia contents on your system locally to access the information without the need for an Internet connection. Check out WikiTaxi, OkaWix or Wikipedia School DVDs if you are interested in those methods.

The latest option has been exclusively designed for the Google Chrome web browser and therefor also Google’s Chromebook. The web application allows you to download nearly all textual contents from Wikipedia to make them available directly in the Chrome browser.

You are asked to either pick a 13 Megabyte dump of the most popular Wikipedia articles or the big database which weights in at about 1 Gigabyte. You can also select one of four available parsers which turn the Wikipedia information into HTML contents that are readable in the web browser.

Especially the large download make take a while, and you also need to make sure that you have enough disk space available for it.

Once installed you can use the following page to access your Wikipedia information offline in the Chrome browser. The developer suggests to bookmark the page for fast access.

It offers a search option, access to the program settings, access to the article index and an option to load a random article from the repository.

The search supports suggestions which are displayed automatically once you start typing in the first letter of your search term.

The articles are complete with the exception of media and the footnotes which are not displayed at all.

Search results are displayed almost instantly on modern computer systems.

Chrome users who would like their own personal Wikipedia copy on their computer can download and install the web app from the official Chrome web store. (via Chromestory)

Enjoyed the article?: Then sign-up for our free newsletter or RSS feed to kick off your day with the latest technology news and tips, or share the article with your friends and contacts on Facebook or Twitter. Wikipedia Companion Adds Wikipedia Browser To Google Chrome
OkaWix Update, Wikipedia, Wiki Offline Access
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Google Chrome Offline Installer About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Tuesday January 17, 2012 -
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