VisualWikipedia puts knowledge in context. It contains the same information as Wikipedia, but presents the information differently, more visually. This way it is easier to navigate the huge amounts of information.

My favorite feature is that each article is followed by a tag cloud and often a mind map detailing how the subject of the article relates to other concepts. The “tentacles” of the map are clickable.

Another cool feature is that in the right margin of the articles, you can browse related YouTube videos. This wont be equally useful for every concept described in Wikipedia, but it adds value to a lot of articles. The videos can be watched in the article or, if the thumbnail format isn’t for you, you can click it to go to the YouTube page.

VisualWikipedia articles are compressed. This means that after the introductory paragraphs, you’ll see just the headings of the article listed. Click a heading and the paragraphs under it appear. This makes it easy to get an idea of what the article contains and lets you skip directly to the information you are looking for.

When you point your mouse to an internal link (a link to another Wikipedia article), a window pops up, showing you the first paragraphs of text on that page. This way you can find out if the page holds the info you seek and save yourself lots of clicks.

At the bottom of the article pages, there is a list of search shortcuts, which will search for the topic of the article in question on YouTube, Flickr, Google, Yahoo!, Yahoo! News and Google Maps.

Right below an article’s headline, there is a link that lets you add the article to your quick list. The quick list is a list of your favorite articles, which appears in the right hand column when you surf VisualWikipedia, so it’s always at hand.

At the moment of writing, VisualWikipedia is available for these Wikipedia versions: Japanese, German, French, Polish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Chinese, Norwegian (Bokmål), Finnish and Catalan. This work doesn’t seem to be completed, though, as navigation is in English no matter which language the encyclopedia is in.

If you enjoy the wealth of knowledge stored on Wikipedia, you’ll have great fun with VisualWikipedia

VisualWikipedia is NOT in any way affiliated with Wikimedia Foundation Inc. or any of its associates.