It would be rare to find someone who hasn’t heard of Wikipedia, the enormous infinite online encyclopedia filled with everything you could possibly want to know. If you frequent the website often, you’ll likely know that the Wikimedia Foundation has offered an application through Google Play, in which consumers can access the website a bit easier than through a mobile browser. An update was sent out that adds a new sharing functionality that offers content copied from Wikipedia to be shared as an image. This new sharing feature has the potential to be a massive hit with social media websites, but only time will tell.
You can literally find just about anything you would want to know through Wikipedia. Oftentimes we’ll find that consumers who browse Wikipedia and discover an interesting fact would like to share the content with friends and family. Consumers will likely copy the text and send it to their social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, and social websites like even Reddit. Because of this new feature, sharing content straight from the official Wikipedia application will be easier than ever and could possibly spread around among other users much more than standard text. How the update works is when a user finds an interesting fact that they would like to share they can highlight the text like normal. This is done by pressing down and holding near the starting or ending point of the text. Shortly afterwards, the word will become highlighted in blue and arrows will form above the word. By selecting these arrows, users can highlight the desired section of text and upon completing the highlighted section, simply select the share button located on the top right of your display. Once selected, a new pop-up will appear on your device, asking if you would like to share the section highlighted as an image or as text.
Either option will allow users to share the content through their social media profiles as long as they have the appropriate application installed on their device. Unfortunately, as of right now there is no option to alter the image the text is placed on. Every copied text that is shared as an image will feature white text on a watermarked Wikipedia labeled dark image. Furthermore, the image can only copy a defined amount of text, meaning users won’t be able to copy more than about a sentence worth of text. This might not be the biggest update to the official Wikipedia application, but it can have a massive effect on how we share content from the website. Reading a text through an image can be more appealing and stand out through the saturated options of social media updates. We may find that social media users will stop and read the short image based text and share the content with their followers and friends compared to reading a few lines of updated text.