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Wikipedia Will Soon Be Available Via Text Messages
pigrabbitbear writes "Even as we all love to debate the scholarly merits of Wikipedia, there's no denying that it's an immensely powerful research and learning tool. That goes doubly so in poor nations, where access to education materials can be limited to nonexistent. To that end, Wikimedia started the Wikipedia Zero project, which aims to partner with mobile service providers to bring Wikipedia to poor regions free of charge. It's a killer strategy, because while computer and internet access is still fleeting for much of the world, cell phones are far more ubiquitous. Wikimedia claims that four mobile partnerships signed since 2012 brings free Wiki service to 330 million cell subscribers in 35 countries, a huge boon for folks whose phones have web capability but who can't afford data charges."
Sounds useful:
SMS to Wikipedia: "water purification"
This article is about large scale, municipal water purification. For portable/emergency water purification, see portable water purification. For industrial wate
Or, if they edit out the disambiguation preamble:
Water purification is the process of removing undesirable chemicals, biological contaminants, suspended solids and gases from contaminated water. The goal is to
SMS is the most expensive way to send data to mobiles by orders of magnitude. Not sure this solves much of a problem.
Maybe to the end user, but I thought SMS was essentially free to the carrier since they piggyback in control packets that would be sent anyway.
Every modern Android based phone can run the Wikipedia app or any of the variants. Given that wireless access is needed to get the text message, I fail to see how that is an improvement over access to the actual pages and full content.
Are you trolling, or for real? Yes, "feature phones" are very popular in many parts of the world not everyone can afford a $600 (or even $100) Android phone.
Mobile providers will provide the TEXT (ie.low bandwidth) version of wikipedia free of charge, via a regular mobile data channel. They will not be providing Wikipedia via text message (SMS).
That would make more sense, but the Wikimedia blog also says SMS (and USSD, similar to SMS with a 183 character message limit):
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/22/getting-wikipedia-to-the-people-who-need-it-most/
...pioneering a program to give mobile users USSD & SMS access to Wikipedia.
And when the cop pulls you over you get the citation
The headline is about one program -- for non-smartphones that can access by SMS, but not by WAP or HTTP. And yes, non-smartphones (e.g. Nokia S40) are quite popular over there, though I believe almost all new ones do have at least a rudimentary browser these days.
The summary is about a completely different program called Wikipedia Zero where they negotiate with wireless providers to provide access to m.wikipedia.org at zero charge for customers whose handsets have browsers and GPRS/UMTS/HSPA/WTFever capability (but not an unlimited data plan -- without this deal, they might be paying per megabyte, or be struggling to remain under a small data cap). Which is why it's a great improvement over access to the non-mobile version (which you can still jump to if it's worth it for a particular article), or to the mobile version at full /MB pricing or data-cap usage.