Latest news

Jul 30 Indywiki now uses Launchpad to handle internalization. Please help us translate Indywiki to your native language, by translating a few strings! Launchpad is a very intuitive way to deal with translations and is being used by many big projects, eg Ubuntu Linux.

Jul 30 I have written an article that presents Indywiki for a greek magazine, you can find it here. Keep in mind that the article is in greek!

Jul 8 We are currently working on Indywiki's internalization, while Serzan has created a debian package for Indywiki. Many thanks to all the debian people who have tested the package!

May 15 Indywiki 0.9.9 is out! Main features include navigation via text links, in addition to image links, visual clues for distinguishing between native images (images in the current page) and non-native images (images in pages linked to and from the current page) and changes that make the program faster and more customisable! Download the program or check the screenshots!

Apr 30 I will be giving a presentation at the University of Piraeus Software Libre Society, on 9 May. Don't worry if you don't live in Athens, as the event will be lively streamed during the presentation! I will present the new version of Indywiki browser, that will be released during the next few days.

Apr 14 An attempt to document indywiki's code has started. If you are interested you might want to check the developer notes!

Mar 22 We interrupt this program to bring you a special announcement: Indywiki 0.9.8 is out! This version contains many new features and the addition of a toolbar, that enables a more pleasant and intuitive navigation! Download the program or check the screenshots. Indywiki, a visual browser for Wikipedia pages.

Mar 12 What's the current status with Indywiki development? After FOSDEM 2008 serzan (Serafeim Zanikolas) has sent code contributions and helps me improve the quality of code. So a lot of refactoring is taking place these days, after that we can start working on adding more features and improve existing ones. And the code will be easier to work on and extend!

Mar 12 The Ioannina Linux User Group (I.L.U.G.) has released iloog, a Gentoo-based LiveCD, targeted mainly at students and scientists! Iloog contains a plethora of scientific applications, programming languages, plus libraries, programming editors and IDEs. Amongst the applications they have included Indywiki. Iloog seems to be a great system to use, especially for IT students and developpers.

Mar 12 As expected, FOSDEM 2008 has been a major success! It's an amazing experience to see so many open source developers and people interested in OSS! I was anxious during the presentation for Indywiki and it is true that it could have been much better. You can find the slides and video, that has been put online by the FOSDEM team (they deserve congratulations for organizing such an event)!

Feb 7 I'll be giving a presentation about Indywiki at FOSDEM 08 lightning talks. Personal goals for the event? "Attract" people to take part in the project, help with new ideas and existing list of features that could be added! Plus have a great time, as I had at last year's FOSDEM.

Feb 4 Bugs, bugs, bugs!A small (and silly) typo error on one line doesn't allow the program to discover and display the correct results of a Wikipedia search on an article. Check the bugs section for more information on this issue that is going to be solved on version 0.9.8

Jan 30 Nice article on linux.com by Dmitri Popov.Thanks Dmitri!

Jan 3 Indywiki 0.9.7 is out! This version contains new features and bug fixes, that result in 40% better results!

Dec 27 Indywiki 0.9.6 is out!Gui hangs while Indywiki tries to fetch and display images have been fixed!Gui is by far more stable now, we are heading forward to the first stable release :) Windows users will get executables of this version in a few days, as I am on holidays away from windows systems!

Dec 25 Indywiki 0.9.5 is out! Windows users will get compensated with a better installer than on previous versions.

Dec 24 A lot of significant refactoring has been done to Indywiki these days! First of all the algorithm that finds related images now takes under consideration which categories the article belongs to, thus results are by far more accurate. This and some more improvements will be available with the next release of Indywiki. If you can't wait,get the code through the project's repository

Dec 14 Indywiki 0.9.4 is out! This release fixes bugs and adds new features.

Dec 11 Indywiki project is going to be renamed as Indywiki. Wikia inc kindly requested that we change the name, as there is a small conflict with their name. Check the TODO list to find out ways to help!

Nov 17 There has been almost one month and a half since indywiki's initial release and feedback has been very good so far! Currently I'm researching on ways to provide more reliable content (thus more interesting), that is based on relationships between wikipedia articles. Searching on other wikipedia sites (than the english one) is going to be added soon. More importantly, there is work under progress considering the overal aesthetics and graphics of indywiki! Most of these changes will happen in version 0.9.2 (not the graphics though). There could be your favourite quote or slogan.

Introduction

Some times browsing over the plethora of information available through wikipedia pages becomes a boring activity.
Indywiki is an open source project that aims to explore different ways of visually browsing wikipedia pages.  This might be very helpful, especially in cases we are only interested to get an idea on the term we are searching for. In other words, browsing through images, while the text is still available to read!

Indywiki also discovers and displays images that are contained on links to our search keyword. Images are displayed in tenths. So if we are searching for a city as an example, after we get all images displayed on the wikipedia page about this city, we'll start getting links about related items (that might be other cities in this country, personalities and culture of this city and practically everything related, the more we keep on getting images.

Indywiki achieves this by taking under consideration

1)articles that link to our article
2)articles that are linked from our article
3)categories to which our article and also all articles on 1) and 2) belong to.

All links get a score, that increases if a link is at 1) and 2), or if it belongs to one or more categories as our article. After indywiki has discovered the related articles, it parses them and fetches their first image, in case they have one. Usually the first image is the most representative of an article. We can continue the search for as long as we like!

Indywiki is pretty straightforward to use.

When the program launches, write your search term on the box and press enter, or the magnifier icon. You will notice that the mouse pointer changes, an indication that something is happening. After a while (depending on your internet connection) text and images will start appearing on the screen. On the left text box titles are displayed. If you click on one of them, it's text will appear on the main text box. Text that appears on the main box is the summary of our search term, which is usually the first paragraphs -according to the wikipedia guidelines on how to write an article!

The text box located on the right of our program, contains wikipedia links founded on the article we are searching for. If you press one of them, a new search will start, with this keyword. After the first ten images are displayed, place the mouse pointer on one of them, and you will see the text accompanying the image on the wikipedia article, if there is one. If the page has less than ten images (or if it doesn't have any images at all), indywiki searches links of that page and displays their images, provided they have not been displayed before. If you notice the column character on one of the titles, the name before the column refers to the page where we got that image, and the string after the column is that image's description. After you have searched for a link and got back the result images, you can press the right arrow, that is on the upper side of the application. The application will try to fetch and display the next 10 images, if they exist, otherwise it will bring the images of the links found on the page we were looking for.Similarly you can press the left arrow and the application will display the previous ten images.

On the other side, if you click on an image that belongs to an article that is different than the term we are looking for, that image's article becomes our query, thus you will get back the results of that page.
However, if you click on one image that has been fetched from the article we were looking for, the image will be displayed on a separate window, at it's normal size, not as a thumbnail!

Technical Information

Indywiki is written on python 2.5, and the gui environment is written on pyqt 4.3. Since it uses qt, the gui is independant of the operating system. It is written once and can be run on Windows, Mac OSX, Linux (KDE, GNOME).

Misc

Integrate indywiki in KDE, by Stefan Rodiger

Authors: Markos Gogoulos mgogoulos@gmail.com
Serafeim Zanikolas - serzan@hellug.gr
Hope you will find the program useful :)

Please help improve indywiki, by sending suggestions, ideas, code, bugs, graphics!