Wikipedia is the 5^th most accessed web site in the world because it contains a wealth of free information on just about any subject that you can imagine. We recently reviewed a free online Wikipedia reader by Easy Things and here we take a look at the Wikipedia Offline Reader by San Francisco-based WikiPock, Inc., which is priced at $14.99 on Ovi Store.

Both of these apps will access the articles on Wikipedia. The added value that the Wikipock version brings to the table is offline access, as well as throwing in access to the libraries for Wikiquotes and Wiktionary, which the Easy Things app does not do.

In a word, offline access means speed. The Wikipock app puts the entire Wikipedia text base onto your mass memory module, so that retrieval of searched information is nearly instantaneous. One of the tradeoffs of the offline reader is that the database does not include photos. As it is, the Wikipedia text library is nearly 4 GB in size, so you can well imagine that if it included the photos, the size of the database would be much larger than could fit on any MMC card. The Wikiquotes library is another 48 MB and the Wiktionary is another 118 MB, so plan on dedicating almost 4.2 GB of your MMC or SD memory to holding the Wikipedia libraries.

For many users, the Wikiquotes and Wiktionary modules alone may be worth the price of admission. For accessing the main Wikipedia library, not having to worry about download times or losing connections while traveling can be the primary value.

I downloaded the app to my Nokia N97, and then proceeded to download and transfer the three libraries to the MMC portion of my device. If you click on the Tutorials tab above, you can see a step-through of the process of locating your unique app ID number on the app, using it to access the WikiPock libraries page on your Web browser, transferring the zipped files, and unzipping them to the MMC or SD on your Nokia device.

When the library files were in place, I restarted the app and went to Options/Libraries to see the screen below, which verified that the app could see all three libraries. When switching from quotes gathering to definition gathering to Wikipedia entries, I needed to go back to this screen to select the appropriate library to search.

Selecting the quotes library first, I searched on “sword”, then “sword of truth” from among the multiple results on “sword”, and it displayed the quotes related to the phrase “sword of truth”, as shown below.

I then went back to Options/Libraries, switched to the Wiktionary library, and searched for the definition of the word “auspices”. That gave me a definition screen shown below.

Finally, I went back to Options/Libraries, selected the Wikipedia library, and searched on “The Committee”. It returned several results for the search, and I chose the one with “improv group”, remembering the great comedic acting troupe from the 1960s.

One final tip that I can pass along is the use of Bookmarks as an organized research tool. The app lets you bookmark your search results, so that, even though your mind is hitting upon several different topics related to a single overall research effort, you can group them in bookmarks so that they can be retrieved in a cohesive fashion.

Wikipedia Offline Reader is available on Ovi Store at . It is priced at $14.99 USD. A complete list of compatible devices is available on the WikiPock web site.