The Wikipedia app has long offered widgets, but they haven’t been refreshed in quite a while and look like something from the early days of Android. An update today greatly modernizes the design.
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Wikipedia is leveraged throughout Google’s products from Knowledge Graph panels in Search to Assistant results on Google Home and other devices. Google.org today announced a $2 million donation to the Wikimedia Endowment, as well as making Cloud services and tools available free of charge to the site.
Wikipedia is widely leveraged throughout Google products, including in Knowledge Panels used by Search, Assistant, and Home, as well as for fact checks in YouTube. Wikimedia is now integrating Google Translate with its built-in tool for editors to create articles in more languages.
This week at SXSW, YouTube announced a new integration to its platform which would put Wikipedia excerpts below some conspiracy videos. It’s a great idea, but awkwardly, Wikipedia was never informed that this was happening…
Today in Austin, Texas at the annual South by Southwest festival, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced that Google is planning several moves over the next year to tackle misinformation on the platform. The first of this round of initiatives is called “information cues,” and basically adds links to Wikipedia articles below videos about topics that often the center of debate…
Earlier this year, Google added bottom navigation bars to the Material Design spec. Top navigation tabs are still permitted, but apps like Google Photos and Google+ have prominently switched over to the new style. Wikipedia is now the latest to adopt these bottom navigation bars across its Android app…
In addition to improving cut/copy/paste, the redesigned text selection pop-up in Android 6.0 Marshmallow allows developers to take advantage of the new contextual selection feature. The Wikipedia app has been updated so that when text is selected there is now an option to ‘Search Wikipedia’.
Update 1/15/15: The non-Beta version of the app was updated today with the same features that came to the beta version last month.
Wikipedia is definitely one the more used Android apps, and today the app’s beta channel has been updated with a plethora of new features. Most notable of them is the fact that today’s release packs a Material design revamp (including a new drawer and overflow menu), and support for Android 5.0 Lollipop. Other features, like the return of the search bar and other layout improvements, are just a couple of the more than a dozen changes made in this version.
The new version also features improvements to search order, Wikidata descriptions under page’s titles in search, and swipe to refresh on pages and on the “Nearby” tab. You’ll also notice, at the bottom of an article you’re reading, that this new version adds a new section called “Read more” where you’ll find various related articles. Finally, rounding out the more obvious changes, there’s now an option in the “More” section for disabling image loading (helpful if you are strapped for data).
As noted on the app’s Play Store listing, here’s the complete list of changes:
– Material design icons and 5.0 support– Search bar is back– Search order improvements– Wikidata descriptions in search results, similar pages, under pages titles– Swipe to refresh on pages and for Nearby– Collapsed infoboxes– Better tablets layouts– Read more section– Allow disabling images– Basic syntax highlighting of templates while editing– Hide IPA– ToC drawer always on– Similar pages, page issues, reference info display changes– Display MathML images– Remove pinch-zoom
People who have asked Google to remove links to news stories under the controversial European ‘right to be forgotten‘ ruling are once again finding the move counter-productive. The BBC News site has posted links to stories removed from Google’s search, bringing back into the spotlight stories that are in some cases more than a decade old.
The BBC posted links to all 12 of the stories removed from Google’s search results. They range from the serious – three men accused of possessing bomb-making equipment in Ireland – to the ridiculous, a dispute over a lost dog …
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In the company’s first transparency report, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, has revealed some information regarding the site’s censorship under infamous European “right to be forgotten” laws — and it’s clear that he’s not very happy with the people who take advantage of them. This isn’t the first time Wales has spoken out against censorship, but now he’s making it very clear that he feels governments are going just a bit too far.
Having a calculator on your watch used to be an impressive feat, but how about an encyclopedia? A new app called Attopedia makes this possible by bringing Wikipedia to Android Wear. Making the most of a watch’s limited screen real estate, this informative software uses a grid-based interface for fast access to historical and trivial content.
Google announced today on the Google Earth Google+ page that it is launching a major update to the iOS, Android, and desktop Google Earth apps. Google is updating the tour guide and 3D imagery features it launched in October with Google Earth 7, and it announced the addition of 100,000 new tours of “popular sites, cities and places across 200 countries.” It is also adding as over 1 million user-generated Panoramio photos:
The new, richer tours combine 3D flyovers, Wikipedia snippets and – for the first time – place highlight and more than 1 million user-generated Panoramio photos in order to create an immersive and educational exploration of your favorite places. Each tour ends with a selection of photo thumbnails which were selected from Panoramio as the best representation of a given place. Clicking on one of the thumbnails enables a full screen photo experience.
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Google has updated its Books app experience on Android, which already features over 4 million books in the United States, Canada, Germany, Australia, Italy, France, Korea, Spain, and Japan. The latest version of the app introduces a number of new features including: highlighting, dictionary, notes, and new “Places” info cards.
In addition to including dictionary definitions when tapping on words, Google highlighted some of the new features in a post on its official Android blog:
Starting today, when you come across an unfamiliar geographic location—a faraway city or distant mountain range—you can tap on the location to learn more about it. You’ll see an info card with a Google Map and the option to get more information by searching on Google or Wikipedia.
Also in the update is the ability to translate words and phrases to a number of currently supported languages. Other features include:
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OpenStreetMap on "Wikipedia for Android" app
Wikipedia updated its Android and iOS apps today, but the noteworthy feature is that the online encyclopedia-like website dumped Google Maps for OpenStreetMap, which marks a growing trend for technology firms preferring an alternative mapping solution.
The company just announced its Android counterpart witnessed 2.25 million installs in less than two months since its birth, while netting over 23 million Wikipedia page views per month. Despite the success with Google’s mobile OS, Wikipedia updated its apps with Open StreetMap data in favor of the service’s “nearby view” feature.
Wikipedia further explained the reasoning behind the switch:
Previous versions of our application used Google Maps for the nearby view. This has now been replaced with OpenStreetMaps – an open and free source of Map Data that has been referred to as ‘Wikipedia for Maps.’ This closely aligns with our goal of making knowledge available in a free and open manner to everyone. This also means we no longer have to use proprietary Google APIs in our code, which helps it run on the millions of cheap Android handsets that are purely open source and do not have the proprietary Google applications. OpenStreetMaps is used in both iOS and Android, thanks to the amazing Leaflet.js library. We are currently using Mapquest’s map tiles for our application, but plan on switching to our own tile servers in the near future.
In the last couple of months alone, both Apple and Foursquare also shifted to OpenStreetMap. It is worth mentioning that Yahoo implemented OpenStreetMap data within Flickr in 2009 for a plethora of worldwide cities, such as Baghdad, Beijing, Kabul, Santiago, Sydney, and Tokyo.
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Everyone has their SOPA/PIPA things today (and that is good!). Here is ours.
My former professor, Clay Shirky, explains what SOPA and PIPA are, what will happen if these are passed and why it is bad. He’s good at this stuff.
Yes it’s Flash (original version here).
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Google has acquired San Francisco based startup Apture, for an undisclosed amount AllThingsD reported today. Aperture is a downloadable browser plugin that presents users with contextual information from sources like Wikipedia to match the current webpage they’re on.
A Google spokesperson told AllThingsD, while they’re not only after Apture’s product, they’re after Apture’s talent to add to the Chrome team.
There’s no word on what the team will actually do inside of Google, but it would be cool to see this technology implemented somehow. Aperture raised $4.1 million in venture funding before being acquired by Google.
Google has confirmed with Search Engine Land that the company is currently testing new a ‘sources’ display inside of Search. As you can see above, the sources section pulls in information, in this case about Rihanna, that has appeared on Wikipedia and various other sources. The section also pulls in song information, in Rihanna’s case.
In most instances while searching on Google you want to find definite information — fast. Google has implemented similar features inside of Search for weather, sports, math calculations, and more. Keep ’em coming!
