Wikipedia has had an official iOS app for some time now, but was missing a presence on Android. That ends today with the launch of the official Wikipedia app for Android.

The app hasn’t been in the Android Market very long, but shows that it falls within the 10k-50k download bucket. Android doesn’t provide actual numbers on its Market pages, but gives you a fair guesstimate as to how its doing. Needless to say, Android users are excited about the new app with many reviews simply saying “Finally!”.

Features include:

Save article to read later or offline
Search articles nearby
Share articles using Android “Share” function
Read article in a different language
Full screen search

The app looks gorgeous and utilizes many of Android’s built in features, especially share.

Even though Wikipedia’s mobile version works just fine on all mobile devices, the addition of location-based features with its native app is definitely a reason to download it. Of course, the app is free and hopefully more features will be introduced as has been the case with its iOS counterpart.

➤ Wikipedia for Android

UPDATE: The app is on a tear and now fits into the 100k-500k downloads bucket

Tomorrow is nuclear day for sites like Reddit and Wikipedia. Both sites will be “blacking out“, which basically means they’ll be shutting down in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). While SOPA isn’t dead quite yet, it has lost steam in Washington DC.

Not to be outdone by others, Microsoft has released a statement about its stance on SOPA:

We oppose the passage of the SOPA bill as currently drafted. We think the White House statement points in a constructive way to problems with the current legislation, the need to fix them, and the opportunity for people on all sides to talk together about a better path forward.

Its statement refers to what the White House had to say about the proposed act:

While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.

Microsoft, which has been slammed for its support of the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), makes a bulk of its money from software licensing, therefore would have a lot to gain from these two acts passing. Microsoft is a member of the Business Software Alliance along with companies like Apple and Adobe that originally supported SOPA, but relented by saying SOPA “could sweep in more than just truly egregious actors”.

Other than this statement, Microsoft has no other plans for raising awareness about or protesting about SOPA on any of its sites, including Bing. Its search rival, Google, will be displaying a link in protest on its search engine tomorrow.

As we reported today, Wikipedia will be shutting down its English version on Wednesday in protest of SOPA and PIPA. It hopes to educate its users on the two proposed acts and ask them to contact their local congress members to stop them from passing.

Wikipedia is a huge resource of information and many rely on it for homework or just for personal browsing purposes. It’s such an important resource that most of its pages surface as a top Google search result for a prominent figure or event. Having said that, there are ways that you can keep a copy of Wikipedia for yourself. Yes, the entire thing.

There are extremely geeky ways to do this, such as mirroring the entire site, but this will take a lot of technical knowledge, know-how, setup. Instead of downloading the entire Wikipedia database, here are a few ways that will cost you a few bucks, but are infinitely simpler.

The apps below don’t require you to be online to view the pages, and you’ll be able to reference Wikipedia no matter where you are, even when it goes dark on Wednesday.

All of Wikipedia

All of Wikipedia is a brilliant and feature-rich app for your iOS device. It will even prompt you to download a dump of the latest Wikipedia pages in a way that requires no technical knowledge whatsoever. All you have to do is give it some time. And by “some time”, I mean generally between 3 and 4 hours depending on the speed of your connection.

➤ All of Wikipedia / $8.99

WikiPock

WikiPock also brings Wikipedia to your mobile device no matter where you are. It’s available for Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian devices. In a nifty spin, if you don’t have the space on your device for Wikipedia, they will ship you a pre-loaded memory card with Wikipedia on it. Of course that won’t help you when it goes dark on Wednesday, but it’s definitely good to know. While not as pretty as All of Wikipedia, WikiPock gets the job done.

➤ WikiPock / $9.99

Offline Wiki

Offline Wiki is an extension for the Chrome browser that lets you grab a copy of Wikipedia for your computer. The extension does all of the downloading and decompressing of the massively huge files so you don’t have to. The other great thing is that you can read Wikipedia in your browser as you’d normally do.

➤ Offline Wiki / Free

Kiwix

Kiwix is an offline reader that you can download for Windows, Linux, and Mac. It’s a project supported by Wikipedia itself, so it definitely has a thriving community behind it. This software requires you to download a copy of Wikipedia yourself, which you can do here. Once you’ve downloaded the gigantic file and decompress it, Kiwix will take it from there.

➤ Kiwix / Free

Wiki Offline

Wiki Offline is a Mac app that works extremely well on your desktop. It includes features like full-screen reading and image galleries. Like most of the apps listed above, it prompts you to download Wikipedia and takes care of all of the heavy lifting for you. Since it’s for the desktop, you can customize things like the fonts and theme of the application.

➤ Wiki Offline / $9.99

So there you have it, five ways to get your own copy of Wikipedia in English before it shuts down on Wednesday in protest of SOPA. So far, the foundation is getting quite a bit of support in its efforts to raise awareness about acts that could endanger free enterprise on the Internet, as well as call politicians out on their failures at communicating why an act like SOPA is necessary. Even though it will be down, Wikipedia is a resource a lot of us rely on, so it’s best to be prepared.

Today, founder of the non-profit behind information archive Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, announced that the site will go dark for 24 hours on Wednesday in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Student warning!Do your homework early.Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday! #sopa

— Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) January 16, 2012

While only the English version of the site will be down, it accounts for 25 million daily visitors according to Wales:

comScore estimates the English Wikipedia receives 25 million average daily visitors globally.

— Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) January 16, 2012

When we talked to Wales in November, he told us that Wikipedia had over 420m unique monthly visitors, and there are now over 20 million articles on Wikipedia across almost 300 languages.

As we reported last week, the site was contemplating taking this action along with Reddit who announced that it would black out its site in protest against SOPA.

The 24 hour shutdown of Wikipedia will be replaced with instructions on how to reach out to your local US members of congress, and Wales says he hopes the measure will “melt phones” with volume:

This is going to be wow.I hope Wikipedia will melt phone systems in Washington on Wednesday.Tell everyone you know!

— Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) January 16, 2012

Along with Reddit, Wikipedia joins huge Internet names like WordPress, Mozilla, and all of the Cheezburger properties in Wednesday’s “black out” protest.

The proposed act endangers the future of sites like these by holding them directly accountable for content placed on them. It has been widely reported that if an act like this passed through and became actionable, many Internet businesses would suffer greatly due to new scrutiny placed on them by the government.

The SOPA and PIPA uproar continues on the Internet and users are urging the Web’s biggest names to protest the proposed acts by “going black”. By going black, or basically shutting down operations, the word can get back to Congress thus causing them to take another look at what these two acts actually propose.

One site called “Wikipedia Blackout” suggests that you donate $1 to support the non-profit foundation behind Wikipedia in case they do decide to shut its site down in protest. Here’s their request:

Wikipedia is considering “going black” to protest Internet censorship. Wikipedia is a non-profit organization, and if enough Internet users pledge to donate at least $1 to Wikipedia, it will reduce the burden on them if they choose to join the protests. We’ll update you once Wikipedia makes a final decision.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) have caused extreme backlash against supporters like Go Daddy and Microsoft due to the fact that these acts grant the government the authority to blindly go after websites associated with infringing, pirating, or counterfeiting intellectual property.

Popular site Reddit has already planned its own blackout date, January 18th:

We have decided that we will be blacking out reddit on January 18th from 8am–8pm EST (1300–0100 UTC).

Instead of the normal glorious, user-curated chaos of reddit, we will be displaying a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action.

The hacking group Anonymous has joined Reddit in its blackout plans, promising to keep its popular Twitter accounts silent during the period.

Will Wikipedia join them? We’ll see. Until then, be sure to read SOPA for Dummies in case you’re not sure what all of the uproar is about.

Wikipedia Blackout

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an app that showed Wikipedia updates in real-time. The information flew by quickly in a stream, showing exactly how active the site is with updates and edits.

If you weren’t impressed with that, then you should definitely check out WikipediaVision.

The app shows updates close to real-time, but plots them on a Google Map showing how truly global Wikipedia is. One second, there’s an updated in Philadelphia, the next there’s one in Paris. It’s even more mesmerizing than watching a stream of text.

Around the world in 3 Wikipedia edits

This is another one of those fun apps that is great to set up on a second monitor that surely beats a boring screensaver.

WikipediaVision gives you the location of the edit, as well as a link to the actual page. It’s unlikely that you’ll click all of the edits you see, it’s quite interesting to see the difference in the type of pages that get edited in each corner of the globe. After watching the app for five minutes, I saw quite a few Wikipedia updates on television shows in the United States.

While WikipediaVision isn’t fully real-time, it’s pretty close. Get ready to lose at least 15 minutes of your productivity upon first glance. Visualizations like this really put the importance and scale of Wikipedia into context.

➤ WikipediaVision

This is absolutely amazing. We know that Wikipedia gets additions, edits, and deletions all of the time, but without a visualization we just have to assume that’s the case.

With Wikistream, we can see exactly what’s happening on Wikipedia in real-time. The background image on the page updates randomly, and sometimes the stream goes so fast it’s impossible to even see what’s going on.

You don’t really have an idea of how much content gets tweaked on Wikipedia globally until you see this stream. Every type of topic you can imagine has dedicated people adding, removing, and deleting information every nanosecond.

If you don’t want to see the full global stream of Wikipedia activity, Wikistream lets you choose which country to follow, and lets you toggle which type of information you’d like to see in real-time. For example, you could watch a stream of just all of the new articles added to Wikipedia, and not updates, edits, or conversations.

If the stream goes too fast or you’d like to click-through to a particular page or edit, just tap your P button and the entire stream will pause.

Here’s how the project explains itself:

Hopefully wikistream provides a hint of just how active the community is around Wikipedia. wikistream was created to help recognize the level of involvement of folks around the world, who are actively engaged in making Wikipedia the amazing resource that it is.

The importance of Wikipedia is often forgotten, as it has replaced physical Encyclopedia’s in many cases. Remember when you used to have to wait for the latest volumes for your set of Brittanica books? Watch this stream for a few seconds and ask yourself if you’d like to go back to that. Probably not.

➤ Wikistream

Wikipedia is known as the “World’s Encyclopedia”, but using it on a mobile device isn’t the best experience. The mobile version of Wikipedia, while attractive, doesn’t lend itself to wading through a lot of information.

Wikipanion is an iOS app developed by Robert Chin, to help you navigate through Wikipedia in a more native way.

There are quite a few Wikipedia apps, including Wikipedia’s own, but this has been the best we’ve seen so far.

Wikipanion is there to assist you

Robert Chin took great detail in designing this app. While it might not look completely different from Wikipedia’s mobile version, you can see that Wikipanion has taken an extra step in formatting the text specifically for iDevices, making the pages load faster.

More features than Safari

The features that you get with Wikipanion, a native app, far surpass the mobile experience of Wikipedia. For example, the app has smart autocompletion, much like Google search, and results come up with a quick summary page to make sure you’ve found the right thing.

The best feature we’ve found is that Wikipanion keeps track of the last one hundred pages that you’ve visited, which makes bookmarking unnecessary in most cases. If you’d rather bookmark a page, Wikipanion lets you do that too. The app will even let you bookmark a section of a page, which is extremely handy.

Wikipanion also uses geolocation to detect where you are, what articles are relevant to your location, and suggests other relevant articles based on the location. These are all things that you don’t get with Wikipedia, but makes Wikipanion the perfect complement to it. Wikipanion also makes it easy to email or tweet an article with its built in functionality.

If you’re an information addict, Wikipanion is the perfect app for you. I’d like to see some other features in the future to see the project moving forward though. For example, I’d love a push notification if a page I’ve bookmarked has been changed, which happens often with Wikipedia. Those types of nuances would make Wikipanion a must-have app.