What is Wikipedia Reader?

 

Wikipedia Reader - An encyclopedia for classic MacOS

Wikipedia Reader is an unofficial client to access Wikipedia's API to fetch encyclopedia articles and live search results and display them. It is written on and for System 6 and requires MacTCP.

Due to Wikipedia no longer serving its API over plaintext HTTP, a plaintext-to-TLS proxy is required to forward requests. Currently this defaults to using a free Cloudflare worker that I've set up, but the settings dialog in the application allows changing this to a private proxy if so desired (or perhaps some actual host on wikipedia.org if they ever support plaintext again).

No translation or conversion is done server-side. Wikipedia Reader accesses the raw Wikitext markup of an article through the Wikipedia API, parses the markup, converts UTF-8 to MacRoman, and displays the text. Basic formatting such as bold, italic, underline, and header sizes are supported, and clicking on a hyperlink to another article will jump to that article.

Wikipedia Reader is free software. I also have some videos about its development and C programming on System 6 in general.

- From Joshua Stein's page on the software ( Noveber 2023)

 

From the legend Joshua Stein, which brought us Wallops and others as fresh additions to 68k Macs, comes Wikipedia Reader. Released October 2023, Wikipedia Reader allows you to connect to and view Wikipedia.org content. 

Please visit Wikipedia Reader - An encyclopedia for classic MacOS - joshua stein (jcs.org) for more information.

Download Wikipedia Reader for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

System Requirements

From Mac OS 6.0 up to Mac OS 7.6

Compatibility notes

v1.1 released November 2023 -- Tested working with System 6.x.x + System 7.x.x

v 1.0 released October 2023

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Mini vMac