A website with a random Wikipedia article and Five a day

There is: zaweba.com/wonder. It is the web version of Wonder by Zaweba, and it shows a Surprise me card with a random article's title, picture and first paragraph, plus Five a day, five articles from five different subjects for today. It is mobile-friendly, needs no account and works in any browser.

The same Five a day appears in the Wonder desktop app, a free offline encyclopedia that reads an edition of Wikipedia you download once from Kiwix. The website is the quick taste; the app is the whole meal.

A random article worth reading

Random article buttons can be disappointing. Plenty of pages in an encyclopedia are short stubs, bare lists or disambiguation pages that only point elsewhere. The Wonder website skips disambiguation pages, lists and summaries only a line long, so the card you see has something to say.

The card uses Wikipedia's own summary of the article. Those summaries are fetched on the server and cached, so the page itself stays light. The title, picture and opening paragraph are usually enough to know whether you want to read on.

Five a day, the same for everyone

Five a day is a small daily ritual. Five articles from five different subjects, chosen for the date. They are the same for everyone on the same date, so you can talk about them with friends, a class or the family at dinner.

They are chosen by a fixed method from 8 hand-picked lists of 65 well-known titles. There is no randomness in it, which is why the website and the desktop app agree on the day's five. The lists favour articles that are well known rather than obscure, so each day gives a mix of subjects with some substance.

Who it suits

It suits anyone who likes learning one new thing a day. Teachers can put the page up at the start of a lesson. Parents can share the day's five with children over breakfast. Someone waiting for a bus can read a paragraph about something they'd never have searched for.

The page works without JavaScript too, so older phones and locked-down computers can show it. A short disclaimer appears over the page the first time you visit.

Taking it further with the desktop app

When a card makes you want more, the desktop Wonder is where to go. It holds the full articles offline in a clean reading view. Surprise me there, on Ctrl+R or the big button on Home, picks a random article weighted towards good ones, and longer articles are more likely to come up. Follow a random link, on Ctrl+L, jumps to a random article the current one links to, and a trail bar keeps every step so you can find your way back.

The app also has On this day, with events, births and deaths from the edition's page for today's date, shelves for subjects such as Science, History and Nature, and a journey map of the week's reading. Five a day is there too, taking the first title on each list that your edition has.

Making a habit of it

A good way to use the website is as a bookmark you open once a day. Read the five, follow up the one that grabs you, and let the rest wait for tomorrow. If one sends you down a long road, that is a sign the desktop app might suit you.

Either way, curiosity is the point. The website at zaweba.com/wonder and Wonder by Zaweba on your PC both start from the same idea: an encyclopedia should invite you in.