Wikipedia Mobile Leaves Beta, Adds Automatic Redirects
After being in what the company calls “alpha-beta-development-maybe-kind-live mode”, user-edited online encyclopedia Wikipedia’s mobile site has officially launched, complete with support for iPhone, Kindle, Android and Palm Pre devices, redirecting these devices to the new mobile page by default.
The mobile site at mobile.wikipedia.org was recently moved to a new server and, so far, around 18,000,000 pages have been served.
From now on, whenever you open a Wikipedia link on any of the above devices, you’ll automatically be redirected to the mobile version. To disable default redirects, click the “view this page on main Wikipedia” link. For the moment, the mobile site only fully supports English and German, but other translations are in the works.
Hit up the full post from Wikimedia (the company responsible for the software that runs Wikipedia) for the complete launch details, then let us know what you think about the improvements and how they stack up against other Wikipedia mobile tools like previously mentioned Wikipanion.
Wikipedia Mobile [Wikimedia Technical Blog via ReadWriteWeb]
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
Wikipedia, being my first source for large blocks of text, is the first place I went to test out copy/paste when I updated my iPhone to 3.0. I couldn't select any of the text and figured that copy/paste only worked in mobile Safari on the 3GS. Later, for poops and laughs, I tried again on a different site. Worked fine. Went back to mobile Wikipedia. Still bad. Switched to standard Wikipedia. Worked great.
Anybody know what that's all about?
@[en.m.wikipedia.org] on your normal browser images are also displayed.
Categories are missing for all, though.
wapedia.org is way better
Jeff Oster
"iPhone, Kindle, Android, and Palm Pre devices"
Somehow Windows Mobile is always left out. I guess the first shall be last.
OK I know that Windows Mobile visitors use a large variety of browsers, but it shouldn't be so hard to detect the main ones like Opera Mobile and IE
burnblue
@jayteemo: I use Wikipanion too.
Sbudda
@eigenguy: I used wapedia, but mobile wikipedia might be better.
azpat
@eigenguy:
wikipanion is the one i use as well much better than the others
Yaka
@eigenguy: Wikiamo is a good one
jesuswhammy
@jayteemo: I used Wikiåanion for a year but realized it's not worth having it when you just can go to the mobile version in Safari.
@eigenguy: i use Wikipanion...
[www.wikipanion.net]
Saved to my enV Touch. Absolutely wonderful for on the go.
I've been using the mobile site for several months from my WiFi enabled PDA, and I love it. Down side is that pictures and categories don't appear, nor do the reference links, but otherwise it's great to have everything up to the minute.
Before that, I used wapedia, but since it only updated once every few months, I missed the most recent changes.
Fabrictramp
Anyone know of a good iphone app for wikipedia? Basically, is there any way around opening up Safari, then loading wikipedia, then doing the search. That gets kind of old when you don't live in an area with 3G.
eigenguy