Wikipop is a WordPress plugin born from the desire to make witty references to obscure subjects in my blog posts — ones that might require a Wikipedia link to make any sense — without totally interrupting the flow of the post. The plugin adds a button to the WordPress visual editor that lets you create a link to Wikipedia from any text. Rather than leaving your site or opening the article in a new window, the link opens in a transient window on the same page. Basically it’s like the difference between reading a footnote and an endnote.
Examples
Try it out, and while you’re at it learn a little something about synecdoche, or maybe another interesting linguistic category.
Usage
The basic usage is simple. When you want to link a word or phrase to its Wikipedia article, just select it and click the Wikipop button in the WordPress visual editor’s toolbar. Set the name of the Wikipedia article you want to display (if different from the text you’re linking), and choose which Wikipedia language to search. Click insert. This will wrap your selection in the wikipop shortcode tag.
You can also manually type in the shortcode tag like this:
[wikipop]heterochromia[/wikipop]
If you want to link to an article whose name is different from the word or phrase you’re linking, you can do it like this:
[wikipop search="John Ratzenberger"]Cliff Clavin[/wikipop]
If you want to search a Wikipedia language other than English, do it like this:
[wikipop language="fr"]Cliff Clavin[/wikipop]
Installation
Installation is a snap. Just follow these steps:
- Click here to download the plugin. Unzip it.
- Upload the entire wikipop folder to your /wp-content/plugins folder.
- Log into Wordpress as an administrator, and activate Wikipop in your Plugins pane.
Credits
Those nice pop-over windows that Wikipop uses are thanks to FancyZoom for jQuery by Steve Smith, which you can read about and grab for your own projects right here.
Changelog
2.0
- Added a popup window in the visual editor to set options for your link.
- Added support for many Wikipedia languages other than English.
- Resolved conflicts with a number of other Wordpress plugins that use jQuery.
1.0
- Initial release.