Wikipedia Launches a New Mobile Interface, Seeks Help 70
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."
Native App (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Screen Size (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [w3.org]
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.
Don't show all that 'featured article' crap (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Native App (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:FINALLY! (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see the point of this when we already have WikiTap [vtap.com] for the G1 and the iPhone.