Does software exist for the sole purpose of reading Wikipedia? Reasons inside:

Question

Like many, I look at wikipedia to in a way learn about computers and computer science. But I frequently fall for the problem of opening more and more wiki pages, based on the related links at the bottom of a wiki page or whenever I find a word I don't know in an article. I try to read them as they come along, but the number of tabs expands at an exponential rate and I can't think of a good system for managing them. It's especially distracting when I have other work going on in my Firefox.

Bookmarking fails at the task, and I can't have 30 tabs open at once.

Hence, I was wondering if other capable programmers had come across this problem and made a wikipedia browser maybe? One that would be standalone from your web browser and read more like a paper encyclopedia with a wikis to read managing tool, maybe favorite wiki pages tool etc?

I know this question is open ended, and maybe poorly explained but hopefully someone has an idea of what I am asking for ^_^. If not, I might consider adding it to a possible project for me to do.

Answer 1

Well, after some extensive Google searching, I can't really answer my own question. The closest you can get to keeping track of Wiki pages to read without bookmarking them is the Firefox extension ReadMeLater.

I did find a wikipedia only browser, but i couldn't really find the advantage to it. Its the Gollum wikipedia browser and can be found at http://gollum.easycp.de/en/ . I even thought it was a little slow.

Maybe WikiBooks? And if you can make your own book to keep track of what you want to read.

Answer 2

Wikipedia Dump Reader (https://launchpad.net/wikipediadumpreader)

An application to easily read Wikipedia's downloaded dump files.

This simple program displays the text-only Wikipedia compressed dumps, currently available at http://download.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html, generally named like pages-articles.xml.bz2.

It's fairly useable now for wikipedia reading, altough lots of rendering or layout glitch occurs. It is focused on usability, and not necessarily trying to mimic the online web interface.

Features includes a Qt viewer with basic text mark-up, following links, ability to read directly on the .bz2 compressed file (although some index creations step is needed on first run), tab-like list of articles with load-in-the-background by default, a simple but useful keyword search, very light source-code, optional latex rendering, no install necessary.