Wikipedia

Looking something up on a train with no signal

You are in a tunnel, the bars have gone, and the article you saved last night is exactly where you left it, loading instantly and reading the same as it did above ground. That is the moment this app earns its place. It asks nothing of you first: no account, no advertising, no attempt to keep you scrolling once you have your answer.

How it handles a long article

Pages are laid out for reading rather than squeezed out of a browser window. There is a clear table of contents, images that behave themselves, and typography that survives a long piece instead of throwing you back to the top after two screens. Dark mode is properly built rather than an inversion that turns every photograph strange. Text size and theme are adjustable, and a reading list follows you between devices once you sign in. Following a link from one article to the next feels like turning a page rather than loading a new site, which is the difference between reading something and merely checking it.

The parts that make it worth opening idly

Explore offers featured articles, notable events and the picture of the day, and it is pleasant rather than pushy. Trim it down or switch it off entirely if you would rather the app stayed a lookup tool. Nearby is the standout. Walking past an unexplained old building in an unfamiliar town and getting the story of what it was turns a detour into the best part of the afternoon. On This Day works the same way, giving you a reason to open the app with no question in mind at all.

Fair complaints about a reader

Editing is where it thins out. The app copes with a typo or a small correction, but anything structural, a citation formatted properly, a table rebuilt, a contested passage argued out on a talk page, still sends you to a computer, so the people who keep the encyclopedia running cannot really do their work from here. Fundraising banners interrupt reading now and then, which is a fair price for a project with nothing to sell you and still a small jolt mid-paragraph. Search occasionally offers a disambiguation page ahead of the article you obviously meant.

As a reader, though, it is close to faultless, and every complaint above is one you can shrug off between stops.