Mediaboss Marketing

Wikipedia has quietly been working on a variety of features behind the scenes as part of its beta program. If youre feeling adventurous, heres how you can make researching on Wikipedia even better.

To use Wikipedias beta features, start by setting up an account with Wikipedia. Youll need to be logged in for the features to work (obviously). You can set up a new account here. Once youve made an account and logged in, head to the beta features page here. There are a range of features you can enable (anyone whos ever used Google Labs will feel at home); well highlight some of the best ones.

One of the most dangerous traps of the internet is the Wikipedia rabbit hole, where you endlessly click through related interesting links. Hover Cards makes it easier to sate your curiosity without opening a bunch of new tabs. When enabled, cards will appear when you hover over a link and display a summary of that page. If all you needed from that page was a quick primer or a picture, this saves you a click. Or twelve.

Wikipedia isnt the only Wiki around. You may have stumbled on projects like Wikiquote or Wikimedia Commons, but they tend to be fairly segregated. The other projects sidebar adds links to related content. So, for example, if youre reading up on William Shakespeare, it will provide you with a quick link to Wikiquotes collection of quotes from Shakespeares plays. Handy.

Wikipedias tweaks arent just user-facing. You can also enable HHVM (which stands for Hip Hop Virtual Machine), which claims to boost page loading times for large articles. Small articles and stubs probably wont be affected much, but larger pages like Ebola load much, much faster.

Wikipedia hasnt always had the best track record with search results. In fact, most of us would probably prefer to use Google. The company is clearly aware as the New Search project aims to fix the problem. Sometimes its just easier to click on the search box in Wikipedia itself if youre already there. If thats the case for you, enabling this beta feature should hopefully give you better results without substantially altering the interface itself.

Editing Wikipedia may not be for everyone, but if you contribute, youll appreciate some tweaks to the interface. The Visual Editor adds something that Wikipedia has sorely needed: a WYSIWIG editor. Now, you can type and see how the page will look immediately. There are also additional plugins for the video editor that you can add to make managing languages or formulas easier.

See the original post here:
The Best Wikipedia Features Still In Beta