Wikini

Despite some academics’ reluctance to accept it as a viable source in essays, there is no denying that Wikipedia is an indispensable fountain of knowledge for humanity thanks to its ever-increasing, comprehensive library of articles about the world.

However, one aspect that could use improvement is related to the design department. In order to ease the burden of its maintainers, one member of the open-source community took it upon himself to release an application that can display Wikipedia’s articles in a modern and stylish interface, which goes by the name of Wikini.

When booting up the program, users are greeted by a stylish home menu resembling Microsoft’s proprietary search engine, Bing. Similar to Windows’ Spotlight feature, a slightly faded photo that changes daily dominates the background.

In terms of the interface, users have at their disposal a bottom navigation bar equipped with shortcuts to Wikipedia’s homepage, a link to a random article, a Languages menu, and a sidebar boasting a section with previously viewed articles. The center of the page features a search bar with additional voice recognition abilities, whose results also include thumbnails for quickly filtering through them.

Opening an article brings up a browser-like layout, reminiscent of Microsoft’s Edge. Articles can be added to a Favorites section in order to collect them for later reading, and the top toolbar also features options to bring up a gallery viewer for easier navigation and quick downloading of pictures, while a table of contents can be shown in a sidebar in order to avoid scrolling to the desired portion of the article.

For the visually impaired, the content can be read aloud or increased in size using the control key and mouse’s scroll wheel. Access to the default Windows share menu is also available, alongside a function to pin articles to the Start Menu to remind the user to read them later and an option to open the link in a browser, according to one’s preferences.

In terms of customization, the Settings menu allows the user to automatically show the last viewed article to resume reading when opening the app, view articles without images to increase loading speed and avoid going over a limited data plan and an option to clear the viewed articles’ history.

Finally, alongside its elegant design language which follows Microsoft’s Fluent system and blends in with the rest of the native Windows apps, the available themes apply not only to the app’s interface, but also to the articles themselves. Thus, the user can view Wikipedia pages in a pleasant dark mode, for better nighttime readability.

For those who want an elegantly-designed alternative to Wikipedia’s functional yet dated layout, Wikini may be one of the best desktop apps for browsing “The Free Encyclopedia”.