Indywikia project aims to explore different ways of browsing the wikipedia universe!

Some times browsing over the plethora of information available through wikipedia pages becomes a boring activity.

Indywikia 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!

Indywikia 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. The more the program evolves, the more intelligent results we will be getting back).

How to use:

Indywikia is pretty straightforward to use.

When the program launches, write your search term on the box and press enter, or GO button. 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 all 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), indywikia 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 Next button, that is on the right side of the application, on the center. 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.

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. Slowly slowly we can start exploring wikipedia virtually...

Indywikia 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).

It uses python threading plus qt QThreads, so that the images are fetched and displayed asynchronously.

Requirements:

· Qt 4.x
· Python-Qt4

Installation instructions:

Download and install PyQt4, either from sources, or from a software management system (on debian based systems, that is apt-get install python-qt4). Python is normally installed on these systems, python version 2.5 is suggested, since the program has not been tested on older versions.

then enter into the directory you have extracted (tar -xvvf indywikia.tar) indywikia and run:

$ python indywikia.py

If you want you can build PyQt4 from source, see more on http://www.riverbankcomputing.com/Docs/PyQt4/pyqt4ref.html#installing-pyqt)

What's New in This Release:

· This version contains new features and bug fixes, that result in 40% better results.