Asha App Spotlight: Wiki Encyclopedia

Wikipedia has a strong claim to be one of the wonders of the Internet. Since its founding in 2001, this free and collaborative encyclopedia has become, arguably, the definitive online reference tool.
Famously, Wikipedia is written, edited and maintained by volunteers. While this could have been a recipe for disaster – pranks and hoax entries are all part of the Wikipedia myth – it’s generally accepted as an authoritative source.

Whether you have faith in Wikipedia’s crowd-sourcing approach or not, you can’t doubt its popularity. It attracts over 470 million unique users every month and posts articles in nearly 300 languages.

That’s why our Asha App Spotlight this week looks at Wiki Encyclopedia (free), which provides a simple and convenient way of accessing Wikipedia on your Nokia Asha device.

All the world’s knowledge

The app opens to give you the ‘featured’ article of the day and is a fun way of brushing up on your trivia knowledge. However, most people will be coming to Wikipedia with a specific topic or person that they want to learn about.

Above the featured article, right at the top of the page sits the search box. This is your gateway to all the knowledge that is to be found within.

Type in your query and press the ‘magnifying glass’ icon to start your search. Within seconds the results page will display all the articles relevant to your topic.

For example, searching for ‘Nokia’ also brought back results for Nokia Siemens Networks, Nokia Theatre LA, Nokia Finland and many more. Just tap the headline for the article that you wish to open.

Help with contents

All the articles rendered nicely on my Nokia Asha 311. Wikipedia articles can be extremely long, so I really appreciated that their mobile pages begin with a contents menu. This helps to navigate to the exact information that you are looking for.

One thing I love about Wikipedia is the embedded links within the articles to make it easy to navigate from topic to topic. I’m glad to report that Wiki Encyclopedia also shares this useful feature.

There are few icons to distract you. In fact, there’s only a back button and a home icon to take you back to the search box and the featured article. The app is all the better for this minimal approach.

In the settings menu, you can also check how much data that you’ve been using within the app. The articles are predominantly text-based but there small images too so this might be something you’ll want to keep an eye on if you’re on a mobile data plan.

Overall, if you want to reference Wikipedia on your Nokia Asha, then this app is to place to start.