Using Bookmarks, Read later and History in Wonder

Wandering is the point of Wonder by Zaweba, and wandering means finding things you want to keep. Three small tools look after them: Bookmarks for articles you want to find again, Read later for a queue of things to come back to, and History for everything you have opened. Each has its own shortcut, and each is kept per edition.

Wonder is a free offline encyclopedia. You download an edition of Wikipedia, Wiktionary or Wikivoyage once from the Kiwix project and then read with no internet, so your bookmarks and history are about the copy on your own PC.

Bookmarks for keeps

Press Ctrl+D on an article to bookmark it. Bookmarks are for the articles you'll want again and again: a reference page you check often, a favourite biography, the article on a place you're planning to visit. Think of them as the shelf by your desk.

Keep the list short and useful. A bookmark list of hundreds of entries is as hard to use as no list at all, so prune it now and then.

Read later for the queue

Ctrl+Shift+D adds the article to Read later. This is a different idea from a bookmark. Read later is a queue, for articles you have spotted but don't have time for now.

It suits the way Wonder is built. Follow a random link with Ctrl+L and you'll often land somewhere interesting while you were in the middle of something else. Rather than lose the thread, put the new article on Read later and carry on. The trail bar keeps your current path, and the queue keeps the side roads for another day.

When you've read something from the queue, it has done its job. Anything you want to keep for good can become a bookmark.

History to retrace your steps

Ctrl+H opens History, which lists what you have opened so you can go back to it. It's the answer to the familiar problem of reading something good yesterday and having no idea what it was called.

For the bigger picture, Wonder also has a journey map of everything you've read in the last seven days, joined by the links between the articles. Click an article on the map to reopen it. History is the list, and the map shows how one article led to the next.

Why each edition keeps its own

Bookmarks, Read later and History are all kept per edition. A bookmark made in the full English edition does not appear when you open Simple English. That keeps each edition's lists matched to the articles it actually has, since a smaller edition may not include a page you bookmarked in the full one.

It also helps when several people share a PC. If a child reads the Simple English edition in kid mode and an adult reads the full one, their bookmarks and history stay apart. Kid mode is in the View menu and switches to Simple English Wikipedia if that edition is downloaded.

Putting the three together

A good habit is to bookmark on purpose and queue freely. When an article catches your eye, Read later costs nothing and keeps your current wander going. When you sit down for a proper read, work through the queue and bookmark the few that earn it.

Use History as the safety net. If you forgot to save something, it's probably there, and the journey map will show you the path that led to it. Ctrl+R for Surprise me and Ctrl+L for a random link will keep giving you more to fill all three, and Wonder by Zaweba keeps them tidy per edition.