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."

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.

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.

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: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