Tired of trying to navigate Wikipedia on mobile? Well, things just got easier for you. Wikipedia now allows previews of Wiki-links to make it easier for you to preview information.
Wikipedia is one of the largest databases of information, which includes close to 5 million articles on topics ranging from tech to medical to “list of lists.” It is the 7th most visited website in the world and receives 500 million unique visitors per month. Wikipedia can be accessed through Wikipedia.org from desktop, mobile, and through its mobile application available for Android and iOS.
Today Wikipedia introduced a link-preview feature for its mobile app. The feature allows you to preview the article behind each hyperlink in Wikipedia articles. Referred to as “Wiki-links,” each link goes directly to another Wikipedia article with information associated with that keyword.
Clicking on the “Wiki-link” for Queen Elizabet (top image) will take you to the article for Elizabeth II (bottom image). The new links-preview will allow you to preview where that link leads before you have to decide to view the page or not.
The feature is almost identical to what you would find with Wikiwand, a Wikipedia reader platform. Wikiwand was the best solution to difficult reading on Wikipedia before Wikipedia jumped into the mobile scene. It will be interesting to see if the new feature for the Wikipedia app will pull users away from the Wikiwand platform.
As an avid user of Wikipedia and its mobile application, I can say this will cut down time when looking up information. There are many Wiki-links that are not applicable with the article you are reading and it can become frustrating to keep hitting the back button. Hopefully this will help solve that issue.
The new feature is currently only available for Android but the Wikimedia Foundation stated that it will be available for iOS soon. It is also exploring the possibility of implementing the function with mobile browsing of the online encyclopedia.