Introducing Wikiview: a new structured way to navigate Wikipedia
Wikiview is an alternative user interface to Wikipedia pages that lets users navigate information in a more structured, Skribenta-like way.
It’s seldom you meet someone who hasn’t used or at least heard of Wikipedia. The free online encyclopedia averages just under 300 million page views per day (on the English site alone) from visitors searching for information on everything from historical moments to medical terms, and pop culture icons.
We’re fans of the site as well. However, as structure-passionate documentation experts we couldn’t help but notice there's a little room for improvement from the user experience perspective. Scrolling through a 10,000 word article to find the information you need is not a painless task, and simply clicking links in the table of contents doesn’t make things any easier. Suddenly jumping to another part of the page is a quick way to become disoriented and lose sight of the broader context.
So, we decided to do an experiment. Applying the same Expand/Compress navigation style we use in our own documentation system Skribenta, we created an alternative Wikipedia interface we call Wikiview.
Go ahead and try it out for yourself. Follow the link below, then search by entering a term in the search box as usual.
TRY WIKIVIEW: http://wikiview.excosoft.se
And please—let us know what you think! Send your feedback to wikiview@excosoft.se