WikiViewer

WikiViewer is an unofficial, third-party client for browsing any MediaWiki-powered site - from Wikipedia to Fandom and beyond, without your web browser. It provides a clean, native, and performance-tuned experience for Windows, designed to be fast and responsive.

Disclaimer: This is an unofficial, third-party client for browsing MediaWiki sites. This app was created by MegaBytesMe and is not affiliated with, endorsed, or sponsored by the operators of any specific wiki. All article data, content, and trademarks are the property of their respective owners and contributors. This app simply provides a native viewing experience for publicly available content.

Features

• Universal Wiki Support: Connect to your favorite MediaWiki site by simply adding the URL in the settings. From Wikipedia to niche wikis, enjoy them all in one app.
• Clean & Native Interface: Experience a fast, fluid, and ad-free reading experience designed for Windows, free from the clutter of a standard web browser.
• Advanced Offline Caching: Save articles and all their media directly to your device. The intelligent caching system ensures you can continue reading even when you're without an internet connection.
• Full Account Integration: Sign in with your wiki account to edit pages, manage your watchlist, and contribute to the community directly from the app.
• Favourites & Watchlist Sync: Keep a list of your most-visited articles. When logged in, this list automatically syncs with your official wiki watchlist.
• Smart Search with Suggestions: Find articles quickly with a built-in search bar that provides instant suggestions as you type, powered directly by the MediaWiki API.
• Discover Something New: Jump to a random article with a single click and explore the depths of your favorite topics.
• Privacy-Focused by Design: Your data is your own. The app collects no personal information, and all caches, favourites, and credentials are stored securely and only on your local device.

Native reader preview

Configure Settings > Connection > Resolver URL / username / password to enable the optional Proxy connection method. The URL can be the resolver base or its /v1/request endpoint. Proxy uses HTTPS POST with per-request HTTP Basic authentication. Credentials are stored in Windows Credential Locker; ordinary settings contain only the endpoint and a vault reference. A blank password keeps the saved password only for the same URL and username. Remove resolver deletes the saved configuration and disables Proxy. Import credentials from JSON accepts Username/Password at the root or inside a Resolver object; select Save resolver after importing. Auto detection skips Proxy when it is unconfigured. WebView navigation/initialization now has timeouts and failed workers are discarded so a stalled challenge cannot wait indefinitely or poison the pool.

The article command bar shows Page with a page icon in native mode and Website with a website icon in Web mode; selecting it switches modes. Enable Settings > Reading > Use native wikitext reader by default to open articles in native mode automatically. The saved preference applies in both browser builds and persists across app restarts; the article's reader button remains a temporary override. Web view is the initial default until the preference is enabled. Both browser builds fetch raw wikitext, server-expanded HTML and the revision ID in one action=parse response, and cache them together. Templates, parser functions, Lua modules and wiki extensions are expanded by the wiki's server. Native controls render the expanded content, supplemented by placement and sizing hints parsed from the raw source. This is a combined source pipeline; it does not evaluate templates locally.

Native content colours follow the app theme. Dark mode mutes off-white panels and pastel headers while retaining their colour hints; text and links are checked against the effective background for readability. Nested translucent backgrounds are composited, and high contrast uses system colours. The modern reader updates its brushes when the theme changes without reloading the article. Images and media retain their original colours. Touch/pen taps activate inline links, including text overflow regions, while keeping text selection available. Block and floated links retain their navigation targets.

The reader supports paragraphs, headings, text formatting, internal/external links, citation anchors, images, nested lists and scrollable tables with spans. It preserves source order, captions, infoboxes, thumbnail placement, declared dimensions, alignment, colours, borders, spacing, columns and collapsible sections where native controls can express them. Expanded HTML's explicit placement takes precedence over source hints. Conflicting source hints for repeated images are left unresolved instead of guessing. Wide windows place floats beside article blocks; narrow windows stack them in reading order.

Raw source, expanded markup, attributes and resolved styles remain available in the article cache. The reader fetches a bounded set of same-origin stylesheets and ResourceLoader style modules returned by the server. It supports static descendant/child/sibling selectors, attributes, :not, structural pseudo-classes, width media queries at render time, inherited CSS variables and !important. Selectors and declarations compile once per document. Dynamic selectors, imports and unsupported conditions are skipped. Galleries and simple equal-track grids/flex groups use responsive native rows; this is a subset of CSS layout.

The native reader renders static SVG, including the wiki's SVG math fallback images. Inline SVG retains static shapes and removes active elements/external references. Audio/video preserve source choices, posters and surrounding captions/fallback text, and play through Windows media controls when requested. External timed subtitle tracks are not yet connected to native playback. Codec availability depends on Windows; another source, the media-file link or Web view remains available. Interactive maps, charts and JavaScript widgets keep using Web view.

The native reader renders common presentation MathML constructs: fractions, roots, scripts, limits, fences and matrices. Native math font metrics approximate browser typesetting. Wikimedia's formula SVGs retain their inline placement and font-relative dimensions; ex uses a half-em x-height estimate. Formula strokes follow the effective text colour, including dark mode and high contrast, without changing the cached original SVG. Relative image containers can place absolute markers/labels using offsets, percentages, translations and stacking order. Ordinary paragraphs flow through native text-overflow regions beside floats and return to full width below them.

Large pages with section headings use a virtualized section list, releasing controls and media when sections are recycled; individual large tables/sections still render as a unit. Article and draft model parsing runs off the UI thread, and obsolete results are discarded. Links to unrealized anchors bring their section into view.

Saved articles appear before connection detection, revision checks, permissions or optional styles are fetched. Repeat visits reuse bounded article/model memory caches; syntax and same-origin styles share a persistent cache across pages. Revision checks run in the background at most once per five minutes per article, with periodic server expansion to pick up template changes. A newer saved revision is offered through Reload page, preserving your current reading position. Late styles keep existing text visible during preparation and apply automatically only before interaction; otherwise Reload applies them. Web mode remains available with the classic custom-theme HTML renderer.

Images load independently with a delayed spinner, cached bytes are reused, and queued requests for recycled sections are cancelled. Audio/video display a loading bar when requested and use Windows buffering progress where available. Favourites and download caching share article requests with the reader, including identical titles on different wikis. Local diagnostic timings retain only a bounded list of phases/durations in article-load-metrics.json, without titles or credentials.

Wiki siteinfo supplies localized file/category/redirect aliases, image-option aliases and safely convertible link trails. This configuration is cached with each article. Unsupported PCRE link-trail syntax uses an explicit English fallback. Parser 0.2.0 also supports balanced inclusion controls while retaining original source. Templates, Lua, signatures, substitution and extension semantics still use server expansion.

Unsupported containers retain their readable children, and unsupported content receives a Web view notice. Arbitrary browser positioning, complex flex/grid, live responsive CSS, uncommon MathML, malformed/ambiguous wikitext recovery and exact browser typography remain limits. Rendering failures fall back to Web view, and failures in lazily expanded or virtualized sections show a readable fallback. The compatibility suite and live parser comparison tool establish targeted coverage, not complete MediaWiki conformance.

The portable article-model tests run with dotnet test WikiViewer.Tests/WikiViewer.Tests.csproj -c Release. Validate XAML and the native control using both browser builds of the UWP project on Windows too.

The editor's Preview renderer switch selects native or Web preview, initially following the configured default reader preference. Native preview updates ordinary text in existing XAML runs and reparses edited paragraph/heading groups on a worker thread. It keeps unchanged expanded content, citation targets and wiki styling in place. When the freshly fetched source matches the displayed article, its cached expansion seeds the native preview immediately. Server expansion catches up after typing pauses, replacing only changed rendered sections where possible. A server failure keeps the local preview available. Auto mode probes the known API directly before using a browser; browser POST requests retain their body until completion and release response handlers after success or failure. Edits that require wiki context use that server result. Native has no client page-size cap. Web preview stays manual and retains its 2 MB limit. Both capture the exact unsaved text; switching renderers reuses the matching result. Draft previews never enter the published-article cache, and late responses for older drafts are discarded. Native uses the shared article renderer. Web remains an explicit preview option, and server expansion limits still apply.

Building with WikitextParser

The parser fork is maintained at megabytesme/WikitextParser, on the netstandard1.4 branch. Build/package that checkout, then select the resulting local feed without publishing a package:

dotnet pack C:\path\to\WikitextParser\WikitextParser\WikitextParser.csproj -c Release -o C:\path\to\parser-feed
MSBuild "WikiViewer.Uwp\WikiViewer.Uwp.csproj" /restore /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=ARM64 /p:WikitextParserVersion=0.2.0 /p:RestoreAdditionalProjectSources=C:\path\to\parser-feed

Use MSBuild from Visual Studio with UWP targets installed. The version property defaults to 0.2.0, which must be available in the supplied local feed until that version is published. This enables localized raw-source parsing. The expanded parser adds local syntax coverage and compatibility diagnostics; it does not implement the entire MediaWiki runtime. Server expansion remains necessary for full wiki-specific content.

Download

Build Guide

Prerequisites

• Windows 11 or later
• Visual Studio 2022 or later
• Workloads: Universal Windows Platform development

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/megabytesme/WikiViewer.git

2. Open the WikiViewer.sln solution file in Visual Studio.
3. Restore NuGet packages if prompted.

Running the Application

1. In the Solution Explorer, right-click WikiViewer.Uwp and select "Set as Startup Project".
2. Press F5 or select Debug > Start Debugging to build and run.

Settings > Appearance > App style offers Windows 10 (15063+, plain UWP), Windows 10 (Fluent) (16299+, extensive acrylic), and Windows 11 (Sun Valley) (22000+, Mica and WinUI styling with in-app acrylic command bars). Unsupported choices are disabled. Automatic selects the newest supported style, following LibreSpotUWP's appearance selection. Light, dark and high contrast colours follow Windows. Changing the style keeps the current page and unsaved editor text. App backgrounds, command bars, cards and native article materials update immediately. Settings indicates when switching control-template versions needs a restart to finish applying the control styles.

Apply app style to native articles extends the selected appearance to article panels and image frames. Wiki colours supply Fluent surface tints; native layout, spacing, borders, reading order and text formatting stay intact. Sun Valley uses rounded outer surfaces and image frames. High contrast uses system colours, and unsupported material/geometry APIs use a compatible fallback. Turning the option off retains the wiki's native presentation with theme-aware text colours.

Article status appears at the left of the bottom command bar. Select a favourite card to open its article; hold a card or Ctrl-click to select several, while the Article and Talk buttons remain available. Right-click a card for Select/Deselect and Delete, including deletion of talk-only favourites.

Native audio uses a single compact play/pause, seek, time and mute bar. Video uses the standard Windows controls in their two-row layout, giving the seek bar its own row without a custom control template. The poster and video share one surface sized to the video's proportions. Content-sized flex items keep small speaker icons from squeezing the player and caption. Saved media is checked first; video streams without automatically downloading each complete source during recovery. Explicit article downloads still cache media. Source preparation and buffering are bounded; failures offer retry and the original media-file link. Text reflow keeps playback alive, while recycling a section or leaving the article releases it. Playback starts only when requested. Sound and Apollo 11 contain audio and video; Help:Media includes an example video.

Print in the article command bar menu reflows the complete expanded article for paper, including off-screen sections. Complex layouts may be simplified; unavailable images retain labels and audio/video retain links. Images are decoded before pagination. The clicked image preview also offers Print for the image itself.

Architectural Overview

The solution has one Windows app, a portable core library and portable tests.

• WikiViewer.Core: A .NET Standard 2.0 library containing article parsing, native layout models, API services, caching and favourites. Clients supply storage, credential, settings, local asset URI and presentation providers. It has no Windows or UI framework references and can be used from a console app, MAUI or another client.
• WikiViewer.Uwp: The Windows app, including WinUI pages, native controls, printing, secure credentials, storage and browser implementations.
• WikiViewer.Tests: Tests the compiled core library, including rendering, caching and preview freshness.
• App Assets: Store listings and branding.

The default app build uses WinUI 2.8.7 and WebView2, requiring Windows 10 17763 or later. Set the MSBuild property UseWebView2=false for a WinUI 2.7.3 and classic WebView build. This compiles against 16299 for .NET Standard 2.0 and packages with a 15063 minimum, following LibreSpotUWP's setup. ARM64 packages require 17763 in either build. Both builds use the same pages and native renderer. Shared stack layout preserves spacing on 15063, and newer editor selection flyouts are checked at runtime; browser dependencies are selected at build time because WinUI 2.8 itself cannot run on 15063.

The core requires the extended WikitextParser 0.2.0 package. Build and pack the parser fork, then supply its package folder with /p:RestoreAdditionalProjectSources=<package-folder> when restoring/building or running tests. A client can reference WikiViewer.Core.csproj directly.

Contributing

1. Fork the repository.
2. Create a new branch (git checkout -b feature-branch).
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add new feature').
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature-branch).
5. Create a new Pull Request.

License

This project is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 License - see the LICENSE file for details.