Articles: Transforming Wikipedia into Fine Art

Article on Mona Lisa with Pic

Articles (link opens in iTunes) is an application for reading Wikipedia.  Created by Sophiestication Software, Articles offers a beautiful user interface with which to explore the world’s “free encyclopedia.”  At $2.99, Articles is neither the cheapest nor the most expensive of the Wikipedia apps, but it is worth its weight in gold.

When you open Articles, you are presented with a simple screen with a search bar on top.  Type in your subject or title, and the app quickly searches Wikipedia and lists relevant hits.  Click on an article and you have clean, easy-to-read content, complete with pictures, links, and reference information.  The content is presented in a way that makes Wikipedia actually look elegant.  Pictures have an information button beneath them that takes you to a table of relevant data. And you can tap on a picture to zoom it or save it to your camera roll.

Users can only do a few things with Wikipedia content:  email a link or bookmark the article.  The bookmarks page allows for user-generated folders for organizing articles that you want to keep.  Plus there is a dedicated “History” bookmark that maintains a record of articles you’ve read in the past.

Bookmarks Page

Two other featured bookmarks are “Surprise Me” and “Nearby.”  “Surprise Me” takes you to a randomly chosen article, such as “Mongolia at the 2010 Winter Olympics” and “SLAF Colombo” (the Sri Lanka Air Force Headquarters). I suppose, if you enjoy reading random encyclopedia articles about Mongolia and Sri Lanka, you’ll find this feature to be indispensable.

Nearby Bookmark

The “Nearby” bookmark displays a map with pins denoting places that have articles written about them in Wikipedia. Unfortunately, I live in the bowels of hell, otherwise known as West Texas, and only two places of interest exist near me (see photo). If you live in civilization (otherwise known as any place other than West Texas) the “Nearby” feature should offer you some interesting reading material.

Articles boasts some nice UI features including locking the orientation by pulling down on the screen, tapping and holding a picture to enlarge it, and tapping and holding links so that they will open in another page.  You can also double tap and hold on the article to move through the content heading by heading, but I found this feature rather confusing and difficult to implement consistently.

What’s Macgasmic:  Articles is a joy to use.  It is, simply put, a beautifully designed application for reading Wikipedia articles.  Wikipedia itself isn’t the most visually appealing web site, but Articles takes the raw material and turns it into a work of art. Like any good reading application, Articles gets out of the way and lets you focus on the content.

Add bookmark/mail link dialog

The touch interface is intuitive, and you can copy pictures, explore links, and bookmark material easily.  I also like the fact that you can open article links on separate pages so you don’t have to use the back and forward buttons to explore different topics.

What’s Not:  Unfortunately, Articles lacks a few features that one might expect for $2.99.  For example, the app lacks a dedicated table of contents button that would make navigating Wikipedia articles (especially lengthy ones) much easier.  It would also be helpful if you could search within an article for specific terms or ideas.  Support on the

Example of Article Main Page Lennon

Sophiestication website for Articles is non-existent–there are no FAQs for the app, and the developer didn’t respond to questions I sent via email and Twitter.  (I suspect this might be due to the iPad launch–Sophiestication just developed a dedicated iPad version of Articles).  Still, it’s disappointing not to receive any assistance, especially since there’s no documentation on the web site for the application, and the implementation of some features isn’t exactly obvious.

In spite of a few weaknesses, Articles has the feel of an elegantly bound, heirloom book.  Because the app is so enjoyable to use, I’m planning to access Wikipedia on my iPhone or iPad exclusively.  No more wikipedia.org for me!

Articles is available on the App Store for both iPhone ($2.99) and iPad ($4.99).