Wikihood For Android: Location-Based Browsing Of Wikipedia Content
Wikipedia is arguably one of the most comprehensive online sources of information pertaining to any topic, person, place, event et al. Despite being hugely popular, and having official clients for Blackberry and iOS-powered devices, the service does not have an official client for Android as yet. Having said that, Android users have no shortage of alternative apps to access Wikipedia from their devices. Adding to the long list of such apps is Wikihood, which takes a slightly different route to presenting Wikipedia content, arranging it in various categories, and in relevance to user-defined locations. Simply put, Wikihood allows you to explore places on a map, and view all the Wikipedia articles relevant to them.
Wikihood might be a fresh entrant to the Android Market, but its iOS variant has been available in the iTunes App Store for quite some time now.
The concept behind using Wikihood is relatively simple. Just feed in a location of interest, or manually navigate to that place on map to view relevant information and articles on people, events, photos and places from Wikipedia.
Using the various buttons in the top-right corner of the app’s homescreen, you can easily toggle between list and map view, manually search for and refresh content. The Wikihood icon at the top-left takes you back to the app’s homescreen. To start exploring content, just hit the search button and feed in a query.
Based on the location of your query, the app lists all the relevant search results in accordance with their distance to that particular place. You can also sort content by Relevance to your query from within Menu > Sort.
Selecting the placemarker icon from the top opens the map on which you can view the location of each search result. Tapping a placemarker displays brief information relevant to that place within a bubble, and tapping the bubble takes you to the associated Wikipedia webpage.
Selecting a search result from the list takes you to another screen on which you can get all the information relevant to the topic or place, arranged under different categories, namely People, Culture, Economy and Geography. Hit a result of your liking to jump to its Wikipedia page. You can also share any article that you are currently browsing by hitting the share button on this screen.
Wikihood currently supports only a couple of languages: English and German. You can switch between languages from Menu > Preferences > Wikipedia.
Among all other unofficial Wikipedia clients that are already present in the Android Market, Wikihood has to be one of the best available options. However, unlike its iOS counterpart, Wikihood for Android is not complete by any means, as there are still a couple of categories (namely Economy and Geography) that are missing from the app. However, the developer promises that it won’t be long before said categories are added to it.
