Wikipedia Launches a New Mobile Interface, Seeks Help

hampton2600 writes "The Wikimedia Foundation is proud to present our new mobile site optimized for modern high-end phones. The interface is focused on being clean and easy to read on your mobile device. We currently officially support reading on the iPhone and Android phones. The new gateway is written entirely in Ruby (using the Merb framework) and the Git repository can be found here. We are looking for open source help with supporting other phone types and translations into new languages. Currently 8 languages are supported, but we'd like to support all languages Wikipedia supports. This is an active project and we are looking for new features, etc. from the community."

Comments

Re:CSS?

[master5o1]

There is also the server side checking of whether it is a mobile device or not which can aide in determining what page structure should be used. Using the user agent string they can redirect a regular wikipedia url to a mobile url, or simply sub the difference in page structure and have no url redirection.

Please don't cripple the iPhone

[einTier]

If this automatically redirects the iPhone to the wikipedia mobile site, I hope that there will be an easy link to click back to the "real" fully enabled site.

I am extremely tired of websites suddenly realizing that the iPhone is a cell phone and immediately redirecting me to the "useful" mobile site, which is usually optimized for WAP devices. Even worse, the majority of them do not allow you to access the fully enabled site in any way, shape, or form. Look, I can understand that some iPhone users would prefer to see the WAP site. However, one of the selling points of the iPhone for me is that it has a web browser that allows me to navigate and read any site. Please allow me to keep using the full functionality of the iPhone and your website and quit trying to dumb it down for me.

Re:Please don't cripple the iPhone

[Kelson]

So far, I haven't seen them do any automatic redirecting. But they do detect iPhone and Android browsers on the regular site and add a link at the top of the page saying "View this page on Wikipedia's mobile site."

Re:Native App

[commodoresloat]

Is there an app you can use to edit wikipedia or just read it? The mobile site doesn't allow editing or logging in.

Great!

[sootman]

And a good mobile version of Slashdot is coming... when?

Re:CSS?

[NNKK]

25KB of navigational HTML implies a rather more fundamental flaw.

Re:FINALLY!

[Mr. Slippery]

What's the point of these mobile sites again? Why are they different?

Low bandwidth, for one. This weekend I was at a campground, right on the edge of having no signal at all (had to walk a half mile from our campsite to get out of totally dead space), and wanted to check the weather report to see if a storm would hit us. m.wund.com is much more useful than www.wunderground.com in such a circumstance.

Isn't this what's supposed to be solved by different stylesheets for different viewing devices anyway?

Of course stylesheets help, but often you want to send different content to mobile users.