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

FINALLY!

[kaizendojo]

I have been waiting for this for a long time and will gladly test the hell out of it. If you've ever tried accessing WIKIpedia with Mobile IE you'd know it was an exercise in futility.

Re:FINALLY!

[Locke2005]

Mobile IE...was an exercise in futility. Yes, but did you notice how much easier it is with Mobile IE to toss the hardware running your browser into the toilet when you get frustrated with it? That's a real improvement in user satisfaction!

Re:FINALLY!

[PGillingwater]

I don't see the point of this when we already have WikiTap for the G1 and the iPhone.

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.

This site violates Wikipedia's NPOV

[Anonymous Coward]

Biased towards mobile devices.

vs m.google

[just_another_sean]

It will be interesting to see how it compares to going to m.google.com and linking to a site through a search result. My experience so far is that m.google does a pretty good job of reformatting sites for mobile devices on the fly.

I'll probably be able to submit some feedback based on testing on the PSP.

Accelerometer support?

[Sockatume]

Shake phone to shuffle "citation needed" tags around page.

Native App

[ShadyG]

Sorry, but wherever possible I avoid booting up the iPhone browser, and prefer to use native apps. There are such apps for Wikipedia available, and free, so I don't see myself using the mobile site. Am I alone in this? I don't go to Netflix, or Facebook, or any other sites anymore where there is an application I can boot up more quickly.

Re:Native App

[brion]

By amazing coincidence, the mobile reformatter serves as the backend for our upcoming native app (and probably other peoples' unofficial native apps once they realize they don't have to run their own reformatter proxy).

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.

Screen Size

[Kelson]

Having used both the regular site and the mobile site on my G1, I can say that the key advantage of the mobile site is that it's optimized for the small screen size. When the screen is only 2 inches wide, you don't want to clutter it up with sidebars and floated images. Sure, you can get around it a bit with a zoom interface and 2D panning, but it's much simpler if you only need to scroll in one direction: down.

CSS?

[roemcke]

Instead of using a different url for handhelds, why not use a customized CSS together with the "handheld" media type?

See http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/media.html

Having two different urls for the same content, but for different target devices breaks the concept of linking. Google and other webpages linking to Wikipedia can not know (and should not know) what kind of device the users have.

Re:CSS?

[Carnildo]

There are changes that can't be done with CSS. For example, you can hide Wikipedia's navigation framework, but you can't keep the 25k of HTML from being transmitted in the first place. You can resize images with CSS, but you can't keep the larger size from being transmitted, and you can't make the client-side scaling look good.

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.

Re:CSS?

[NNKK]

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

Don't show all that 'featured article' crap

[SuiteSisterMary]

Put it on another page. Mobile isn't just about displaying on a small screen; it's about not wasting your user's bandwidth. The page at 'm.wikipedia.org' should have a search box. Done. Put a link to a 'featured article' or some such if you must.

Re:Don't show all that 'featured article' crap

[hampton2600]

We are targeting users who most likely have unlimited bandwidth. That's who mostly would be using a site like this anyway. if you want a really small and efficient version, try the old WAP gateway at mobile.wikipedia.org

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."

Great!

[sootman]

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