The Best Wikipedia Tools and Resources

Since its launch in 2001, Wikipedians have created about 4.5 million articles on the English version of Wikipedia alone which is roughly equivalent to 2000+ print volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica. If you are also interested in becoming a contributor, follow the Wikipedia tutorial or get the Missing Manual which is available online for free.

Q: Can I download Wikipedia? Or maybe buy Wikipedia on a DVD just like Britannica?
You can download Wikipedia through Kiwix. It is a single zip file that’s also available via BitTorrent. A children’s charity group in UK has created a Wikipedia DVD with some 6000+ articles for school children that you can download at schools-wikipedia.org.
Q: How do I know which Wikipedia pages are linking to my website?
A: Open the Link Search tool on Wikipedia and type the address of your website. Always use a wildcard before the domain name to take care of both www and non-www links. For instance, a query like *.xyz.com will show all Wikipedia articles that link to the xyz.com site.
Q: How do I save Wikipedia pages as PDF ebooks?
A: You can use the book creator tool inside Wikipedia to create an ePUB or PDF ebook from one or more Wikipedia articles.
Q: Share me some cool tools and mashups built around Wikipedia?
A: Here’s an updated list:

• stats.grok.se – Find the daily pageviews (traffic) of any article on Wikipedia.
• Deletionpedia – this is an archive of pages that have been deleted from the main Wikipedia website.
• Wikipedia Vision- See edits happening on Wikipedia from different parts of the world in near real-time.
• User Edits – Get a list of all the deletes and edits made to a Wikipedia page by any particular user.
• Wikimindmap – It creates mind map of any Wikipedia article with the various nodes pointing to other articles that are linked from the main article.
• @CongressEdits – This is a Twitter bot that tweets anonynous edits made to Wikipedia from IP address in the US Congress.
• Edit List – The list of most active Wikipedia users by the number of edits.
• Count List – The list of most active Wikipedians by the number of articles created.
• Wiki Blame- quickly find the author(s) of any specific passage of a Wikipedia article.
• Wiki Checker – Get a list of all users who have edited a particular Wikipedia article.
• User Contribution – See the contributions and edit history of any Wikipedia user.
• Wikistream – Visualize the current editing activity on Wikipedia in realtime.

Q: I want to contribute to Wikipedia but the Wiki syntax is confusing.
A: You can write a document inside Microsoft Word and then use this extension to convert the Word Document into MediaWiki markup that Wikipedia can understand. Alternatively, you can write in HTML and use a convertor to transform the HTML tags into Wiki markup.
Q: I am looking for some free images for my website. Can I use images from Wikipedia without worrying about copyright?
A: It depends. Every image (or media) available on Wikipedia has an associated copyright tag which indicates the license of that file. This page has more information on reusing content outside Wikipedia.
Q: Does Wikipedia offer RSS feeds?
A: Every article on Wikipedia has an RSS feed though they aren’t obvious. Click the “History” tab on any Wikipedia page and you’ll find RSS icons in the left toolbox. See: How to Track Wikipedia Articles.
Q: Wikipedia is blocked in the country. Any workarounds?
A: Please read this guide on how to access blocked sites for reading Wikipedia through alternate routes.

Q. How should I create links to Wikipedia articles?
A: Wikipedia articles change with time. Therefore when you are linking to any Wikipedia page from your website, consider linking to the current snapshot of the page and not the main article. You can find the permalink (URL) to the page snapshot in the right sidebar as “Permanent Link.”