Wikimedia Mobile is Officially Launched
iPhone Version in English
After spending about 6 months in alpha-beta-development-maybe-kind-live mode, we have recently moved Wikipedia Mobile over to a new fast and sexy server. With this new server, we’ve reached the point in development where we can call this baby “launched”!
When I was brought on board at Wikimedia, I was tasked with endowing Wikimedia with a compelling mobile offering. From the beginning, we knew we were going to focus on “fully featured” smart phones. These phones are taking more and more of the market and we believe they will have an easy majority-share in a couple years. The goal is to build for the future.
At the moment, the Mobile site supports iPhone, Kindle, Android, and Palm Pre. And we fully support both English and German. There are other working languages, but they haven’t been fully translated yet. Our goal is to grow slowly and do it really well. We are starting out simple with limited support in order to test the usability and the platform’s stability. So far, things are looking good.
During the beta test period, we’ve served around 10,000,000 pages. You can view the hourly stats here (updated every hour on the hour). And with this new test server, we should be able to do more.
Based off of requests from Google and the Palm Pre folks… and with what just makes sense. We are doing default mobile redirects. That is, if you open a wikipedia link on a supported mobile device, then you get redirected automatically to the mobile gateway. If you click the “View this page on main Wikipedia” then we disable that redirect with a cookie. This way, the 99% of people using mobile devices to read Wikipedia on-the-go have a seemless experience. And, the 1% who like to edit on their mobile device can use their browser to view the main site and do all the fancy things that they like doing. We suspect an initial outcry from the editors that use their mobile devices, but hope that will calm down. We’ve had very good feedback from the 99% and so we can’t forget those folks. If anyone has any suggestions on how to make this easier for the 1% who are editing while mobile, we’d love to hear from you.
If you want live updates about the Mobile site then you can follow WikimediaMobile on Twitter. Also, if you know any Ruby, you can grab the source code via git from Github and helpout! Feel free to contact me via email with any questions.
Also, special thanks to Nic Williams and Ryan Bigg from Mocra for help with the Ruby 1.9 transition and thanks to Yahuda Katz for help with the XML parsing layer and for all his work on the Merb framework.
[...] quite some time, Wikimedia’s Lead Mobile Developer Hampton Catlin recently announced on the Wikimedia technical blog that the site is live on a new server and ready for [...]
[...] quite some time, Wikimedia’s Lead Mobile Developer Hampton Catlin recently announced on the Wikimedia technical blog that the site is live on a new server and ready for [...]
[...] quite some time, Wikimedia’s Lead Mobile Developer Hampton Catlin recently announced on the Wikimedia technical blog that the site is live on a new server and ready for [...]
[...] quite some time, Wikimedia’s Lead Mobile Developer Hampton Catlin recently announced on the Wikimedia technical blog that the site is live on a new server and ready for [...]
Nice work HC.
Colin
[...] quite some time, Wikimedia’s Lead Mobile Developer Hampton Catlin recently announced on the Wikimedia technical blog that the site is live on a new server and ready for [...]
[...] 在Wikipedia手机版网站经历了多个开发阶段之后，最近，Wikimedia的首席移动开发师汉普顿·卡特林（Hampton Catlin）终于在Wikimedia技术博客上宣布网站已经转移到新服务器上，为正式运行做好了准备。 [...]
[...] 在Wikipedia手机版网站经历了多个开发阶段之后，最近，Wikimedia的首席移动开发师汉普顿·卡特林（Hampton Catlin）终于在Wikimedia技术博客上宣布网站已经转移到新服务器上，为正式运行做好了准备。 [...]
[...] sechsmonatiger Entwicklungszeit hat Wikimedia ihr Mobile-Gateway Wikipedia Mobile offiziell an den Start gebracht. Das Portal unterstützt zunächst mobile Zugriffe von iPhone, Kindle, Android und Palm Pre. Voll [...]
[...] up against other Wikipedia mobile tools like previously mentioned Wikipanion. Wikipedia Mobile [Wikimedia Technical Blog via [...]
[...] up against other Wikipedia mobile tools like previously mentioned Wikipanion. Wikipedia Mobile [Wikimedia Technical Blog via [...]
[...] [via] Read More T-Mobile Launches Motorola ZN5 CameraphoneSarah Palin’s Tech TroublesThe Japanese [...]
[...] Wikimedia Foundation has officially launched a new mobile optimized version of Wikipedia. This new mobile version is designed for “fully [...]
[...] Mobile [Wikimedia Technical Blog via [...]
[...] Although we only currently only have 30 applications in the App Catalog we have a very large selection of web apps created for smartphones out there. It comes as no surprise that all of the web apps created for the iPhone work very well with the Palm Pre. Wikimedia Foundation has finally put their hand in with the official launch of the mobile optimized Wikipedia. [...]
[...] Mobile [Wikimedia Technical Blog via ReadWriteWeb] Tagged:mobile [...]
how ’bout supporting Windows Mobile devices? :) [HTC Touch Pro here]
[...] up against other Wikipedia mobile tools like previously mentioned Wikipanion. Wikipedia Mobile [Wikimedia Technical Blog via [...]
Brian: Microsoft hasn’t responded to our contact attempts….
[...] rimasta in fase di beta per alcuni mesi. Hampton Catlin, capo del progetto mobile di Wikimedia, ha finalmente annunciato che la versione per cellulari è uscita dalla fase di beta ed è disponibile al pubblico nel pieno [...]