The Wikipedia plug-in is a small browser in a slide-out that goes nowhere but Wikipedia. Type a topic and you're reading it; follow a link and you stay inside Wikipedia; and the topics you've looked up are kept, so you can get back to them next week. When an article deserves more room, one click opens it in the View as a document of its own. It's for looking something up beside the work you're doing, without a browser window wandering off into the rest of the web.

Turning It On

Wikipedia is one of the plug-ins, so it's off until you ask for it. Open the Settings sheet from This PC, tick Wikipedia in the Plug-ins list, and restart Desktop Minder. A Wikipedia tab then appears on the right-hand strip. The browser itself isn't started until the first time you open the panel, so having it switched on costs nothing until you use it.

Looking Things Up

The Topic Box

Along the top of the panel are Back and Ahead, then the topic box, then two buttons on the right. Type in the box and press Enter:

• Words are looked up with a Wikipedia search (English Wikipedia).
• A Wikipedia address goes straight there.
• Nothing at all goes to the Main Page.

What you type goes to Wikipedia and nowhere else. As you read, the box shows the name of the page you're on. The panel opens on the page you last visited, or the Main Page if there hasn't been one.

Following Links

A link to another Wikipedia page, in any language edition, opens in the panel. A link to anything else, such as a page a footnote cites, is handed to your usual web browser instead, and the panel stays where it was. Only ordinary web addresses are passed on, so a link can't ask Windows to run something. Back and Ahead are grayed until there is somewhere to go. Desktop Minder's own keys stay Desktop Minder's: the browser's usual keyboard shortcuts are switched off in here.

Topics You Have Visited

The first of the two buttons on the right, a down-pointing chevron whose tip reads Topics you have visited, lists your forty most recent topics, newest first. Choose one to go back to it. With nothing yet, it says "No topics yet".

The history keeps up to 500 topics, and only articles count: search results and other Special pages aren't remembered as topics, though the panel will still reopen on them. Visiting a topic again moves it to the front instead of listing it twice. It's kept in a small file, Wikipedia.json, in the plug-in's own folder under PlugInData in your Apps\Cilwa folder, and written when you've been on a page a moment and when the program closes. One history serves the panel and every Wikipedia View.

Listening to a Page

A page with sound on it, such as a recording of a spoken article, plays in the panel. Starting it pauses the Jukebox and silences whatever else was sounding, since only one thing sounds at a time. Closing the panel doesn't stop it, so you can go on listening while you work.

Opening a Page as a View

The second button on the right, Open this page as a View, opens the page you're on in the middle of the screen, as a View of its own, headed by the article's name. It's a web View like any other, with Back and Ahead and their lists, Refresh and the page's own right-click menu, with one difference: it too follows links only within Wikipedia. What you read there is added to the same history of topics.

Behind the scenes, the View is a small .wiki file, which is a plain-text internet shortcut with the article's address in it, kept in a Views folder in the plug-in's folder and opened the way any file is. There is one file for each topic, and opening the same topic again just reuses it. Because it's an ordinary file, you can find it, and copy it to a folder or a launcher of your own to keep an article one double-click away.

Not Yet

• Other languages' search. Typed words are looked up on English Wikipedia; a link to another language's page works, but there is no way to choose.
• A sister project, such as Wiktionary: only wikipedia.org and its subdomains count.