Wikipedia articles are long, dense walls of text, and every reader gets the same
one. People who want a quick answer increasingly turn to AI chatbots instead of
Wikipedia; people who want to explore related topics click blue links and lose
their place; and readers who cannot read easily have little support.
WikiGlance adds an optional companion to any article that lets a reader choose how
they read it a quick glance, a section map, the full text, or an interactive
exploration and listen instead of reading. It never changes the article and never
writes a new sentence: every view is assembled from content that already exists in
Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and the article itself. No generative AI produces any
reader-facing text.
Challenge: Explore knowledge
Team: #09E Asia 2 | Team Magistral | Wikimania 2026 Team Challenges
Status: Working prototype, running on real wikis as a personal script
Repo: https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/jnana/wikiglance
Licence: GPL-3.0
What it does
A small toolbar at the top of any article offers four views plus Listen:
- Glance: a visual snapshot: hero image, key facts from Wikidata, a "Did you know?" line pulled from the article, and a timeline built from dates in the item's statements and qualifiers.
- Skeleton: every section heading and its first line, with collapsible subsections; clicking one jumps into the full article there.
- Full article: the unchanged article (default).
- Explore: three tabs:
- *Connections*: an interactive graph of related people, places and events, grouped by relationship, drawn with real Commons photos, with a breadcrumb trail so you can travel and come back.
- *Images:* free Commons images of the topic with full licence/author attribution and a "Load more" button that searches Commons deeper.
- *Trivia:* a quiz generated from the topic's own facts.
- Listen: reads the current view aloud (play / pause / stop / speed), choosing the best voice the device offers.
The content is multilingual automatically (it follows the wiki you read), and the
interface labels are translated through a message layer (English, French, Hindi so
far), falling back to English.
Install (one line)
The code is hosted on Meta, so anyone enables it by adding one line to
meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyPage/global.js it then runs on every
Wikimedia wiki.
Progress
Done:
- GitLab repo
- Name and licence agreed (WikiGlance, GPL-3.0)
- Glance: image, facts, "Did you know?", timeline (incl. qualifier dates)
- Skeleton: section parsing, jump-to-section, collapsible subsections
- Explore › Connections: grouped, interactive photo graph with trail
- Explore › Images: Commons category + search, with attribution
- Explore › Trivia: multiple question types
- Listen: speech synthesis with play/pause/speed and voice selection
- Interface translation layer (en, fr, hi)
- One-line install via Meta global.js
- Documentation (README, FAQ)
Remaining / stretch:
- Apply Wikimedia Codex components to the UI
- Dedicated mobile layout for the Connections graph
- More interface translations
- Register as a real on-wiki gadget (needs admin / community process)
- Extension:Wikispeech integration for production voice
- Showcase presentation