Wikispooks:Wikipedia+

This page is a work-in-progress. An alpha version of the extension is immanent and volunteer testers are needed. If you would like to try it and provide feedback use this Email form

Wikipedia+ is a Browser Extension which augments Wikipedia pages with links to additional relevant information unlikely to be covered adequately, if at all, on Wikipedia itself. Wikispooks is a Wikipedia+ - enabled site.

Important Note: The Wikipedia+ initiative is entirely outside the ownership, management or control of the Wikipedia Foundation or Wikipedia itself.

Rationale

Wikipedia is a vastly popular on-line encyclopedia. Anyone seeking information, on almost any subject, will find that links to a relevant and useful Wikipedia page will invariably appear in the first few results of any Google search. However, in common with all mainstream media sources, there is a well-documented problem with Wikipedia:

To the extent that a subject is judged threatening to established power and the widespread acceptance of 'official narratives' of events, the reliability and ultimate accuracy of Wikipedia articles touching on it is likely to be compromised. At the extremes of power and perceived threat, Wikipedia's 'Neutral-Point-of-View' principle pretty much guarantees that the compromise will be fundamental. (See The Problem with Wikipedia for a fuller discussion)

It is this problem that Wikipedia+ addresses.

How Wikipedia+ works

Wikispooks and a number of other sites maintain indexes of Wikipedia pages whose subject matter renders them likely to suffer from the problem outlined above. The indexes contain links to additional information which is unlikely to be treated adequately, if at all, on corresponding Wikipedia pages.

Whenever a Wikipedia page is accessed by the browser, the page name is checked against a user defined list of those site indexes. If the page name exists in one or more of them, a pop-up bar containing links to the additional information is displayed.

If the extension does NOT pop the message bar, it indicates that additional information relevant to the current Wikipedia page is NOT currently available (or rather not currently indexed as being available) on the alternative sites list. In this circumstance you have the option of creating an appropriate index page on one or more of the alternative sites, by clicking the extension status-bar icon and selecting the required site. Template:Wikipedia+Info

Users

Download

Note: The extension is currently available only for Mozilla Firefox. It should work with all versions from 3 to 5 inclusive. A decision on implementing it for other browser platforms will be made following experience with the Alpha and pending beta Firefox implementation.

• Latest alpha version of the extension can be downloaded here

Contacts

• Wikipedia+ web site