Setting up mobile home pages for different languages is a very important part of my job here at Wikimedia. The English mobile home page has been setup for a while and it is based on CSS selectors. A couple other languages, (like Spanish) were easy to implement CSS solutions for and therefore I had gone ahead and created mobile home pages with the help of those communities. However, I am only one man and manually contacting each Wikipedia admin structure individually was taking far too long. Besides, different languages have different items on their home page!

With the help of Petter Strandmark at the Swedish Wikipedia, we have come up with another method that should hopefully work better for lots of different languages: A customized mobile home page. If you want a mobile home page in your language, just send us the name of the page and I’ll wire it up. You can see this is the Swedish mobile main page and here is the corresponding specialized mobile home page on the main site.

It’s one of those obvious solutions that takes way too long to come up with… but at least we have it now.

Now, each community can build the mobile homepage that they are looking for and maintain it themselves with whatever content they want.

If your language wants to produce a mobile home page, then open a ticket in Bugzilla that includes the URL of an already setup MainPage version and I’ll sort it out!

Cheers!

We have a lot of cool stuff that got pushed out today. I’m really excited to tell you about it. First of all, Derk-Jan Hartman (github: hartman) has been hard at work bringing us NetFront support. NetFront is the HTML rendering backend to many devices. Here is a list of the devices that Derk’s hard work has given us blessed access to.

• Most SonyEricsson Phones
• Nintendo Wii
• Sony PS3
• Sony PSP

He’s also working on Opera Mini support and has done a lot of awesome refactors on the code. Fixing many an embarrassing lines of code for me. Its great to see other people chipping into the project and I know for me personally, its a big inspiration to see people giving their time to help this project out!

Now, on to a small tweak that we made to the subcategory expansion system. Its a really small change, but should make using the app even easier. If you want to expand a subcategory, clicking on the title of the category gets the job done. No more having to aim your finger at the “Show” button. Obviously, it also hides if you do it when the section is visible. Its these types of changes that are my favourite. Someone might not even notice it, but it should make their usage of the site a litttttle bit easier.

We’ve also done various and sundry internal changes. We got a patch from Jacques Crocker to use Bundler to manage our Gems. Getting the capistrano part right on that was a bit difficult and so we had a little downtime today while I was working out those kinks. But, from now on, it should be much, much easier to get a local copy of Wikimedia Mobile up and running on your system.

We’ve also expanded the number of supported languages recently. All of this is thanks to the tireless work of Niklas Laxström and others from the TranslateWiki project. They were very helpful in building an API for us to import new languages. I wrote a couple rake tasks and Ruby bits to make it all go. So, now all you have to do is type `rake lang:import` and it will download the freshest strings you’ve ever parsed.

Here is an updated list of all of the languages we support: af, ak, ar, az, bg, bn, br, bs, ca, cy, de, dsb, el, en, eo, es, eu, fi, fr, gl, gv, he, hi, hr, hsb, hu, ia, id, is, it, ja, ka, km, kn, ko, ksh, kw, lb, li, lv, mg, mk, mt, nl, no, oc, pl, pms, ps, pt, ro, ru, sah, sh, sk, sl, su, sv, te, th, tr, uk, vec, vi, wo, and xal. I really have no idea what most of those languages are, but I’m also super happy to support them. And, I’d like to welcome the newest member to our class: Akan (ak), comes to us from Ghana! I know, cool right? Technically, its not a language but an Ethnologue. (Must stop myself from reading too much about this on Wikipedia… and finish this post)

Well folks, that’s it for the moment. Now that I’ve completed my move to another continent you should be seeing a lot more updates coming through on the mobile site. I’m really excited about where we are going and I’m also excited to reveal the results of our survey in the next couple weeks. Some really interesting and exciting things in there!

“We have just launched this site… please send us your feedback!” When we added these words to the top of 1/5th of the mobile pages, we began a barrage of feedback to the mobile list. So much so that, we had to make a second list just for this kind of feedback. That certainly wasn’t unexpected and my fiancee, Michael Lintorn, has been fantastic about responding. He’s spending his summer answering about 150 messages to the list a day, ensuring that everyone knows that we are actually human and making sure we get all the weird bugs taken care of.

What I didn’t expect, was how many people absolutely, totally misunderstand the link. I would change the link to be more clear, but I’m not really sure how I can make it more clear without it just being a list of caveats the average person wouldn’t read.

However, the silver lining here is that we get a whole bunch of really hilarious messages where people are obviously not understanding A) What Wikipedia is, or B) What planet we are on.

Enjoy.

Hey I’m looking for a pic of the rood inverse with the inscriptons around it, if you can e-mail it to me I would really appreciate it. Thanks guys and keep up the good work

Oh, yes sir! We’ll get right on that.

Hey razor.I was just watching some boxing on tv and I thought about you.do you remember me from the time you bought your rv at independence rv in florida.my name is ### and I was the one who got your rv ready.as I remember I think you came back and traded 2 or 3 times in a row.you asked me if I liked working on rv’s and I made the joke. I guess it beats getting the crap beat out of you for a living.haha.any how I hope that large family of yours is well and your invention works out.take care

Razor, if you are out there. Please contact this person. He misses you.

This is great can you tell me where I can buy the whole series

Oh, its on Aisle 3.

Can’t find def for bafoone

Try another spelling.

Love your show. My wife & I watch every weekday.
Thanks for being a great great great great great American!

Yes, in my spare time I’m *am* a TV producer. Its one of the many hats we all wear at Wikimedia.

Best of luck this Friday.
Bob the window cleaner (just a normal guy like you)

Us regular guys have to stick together. And thanks for the goodluck wish. I could use it!

Why did he get Fired now will watch only ###LOCAL#STATION### news

Local news is the WORST. Politics, politics, politics.

I was looking up some health related stuff and would have preferred to
have a way of not being forced to see it. For example, when you go to
the page about jaundice, you imediately see a picture which looks
creepy when it fills up the small screen…

I do agree that all gross diseases should only have pretty people in the example pictures.

I would like to know more about the high sugar content caused by
cortisone injections and whether  or not it’s reversable by diet. The
cortisone is for arthritis which many people suffer from. I was hoping
to get a more detailed info pack for this with diet tips. I only had
three large doses but it has raised my sugar very high and I want to
counteract it. Would be glad if some of this was on site as I know you
did mention cortisone. However the site was a bit involved and I could
not really decide into wwhich category I was fitting!!! Thanks though
for a generally helpful site

Our medical staff will be back to you with this advice shortly.

Anyhow, I hope some of these made you smile!

Some of the things I learned about new projects and scaling issues.

BTW, I think we can settle that Ruby applications don’t have to be slow. Far from it.

[vimeo 5749262 600 450]

Follow me on Twitter @hcatlin or @WikimediaMobile

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.