Two weeks ago, we submitted the official Wikipedia Android App into Google’s Android Market. Since then, we’ve seen an amazing reaction from our Android users. We’ve had over 500,000 installs, we’ve become #4 in top free books and reference, and we held the #1 trending spot in the whole Android Market last week. Those stats don’t even reflect how great we’ve been doing internationally. Thank you to our users for supporting us.

We wanted to do this blog post sooner, but we had a busy news week helping to protect the Internet and releasing two important updates to fix GPS and performance related issues. Now, we’re excited to talk about it. (more…)

We’ve been really interested in search lately. Last month we improved our mobile site by adding search type-ahead suggestions, term-by-term search building, and a larger input box. Those changes were really helpful but we weren’t quite done yet. As we thought more and more about search it became clear that we weren’t using our usable space very well. Screen real estate is precious and you have to use it very wisely on mobile. Rather then squishing all of our search results inside a fraction of the screen we’re testing using the whole screen for search results. When you search on the beta you’ll notice that the search interface now uses your whole screen rather then a tiny and hard-to-tap portion.

Most of our users have said that when they search they are moving forward not backward. As a result we want to focus their experience on what they are actually doing: search. By using the whole screen we can better focus our users and provide them with a richer experience. We’ll continue to iterate on the design as we get feedback from you.

As we mentioned last time, anyone can try new features by opting in to the beta. We also made it easy to track the current release features by going here. Please opt in and give use feedback. Don’t be shy, help make Wikipedia on mobile a success!

Over the last month, we’ve been hard at work building a Wikipedia Android app for our users and partners that prefer apps over the mobile web. It’s built with the PhoneGap framework and makes use of HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript to power all of its features. Many thanks to our partners at Nitobi for getting us here.

Thanks to the Wikimedia Operations team our blog is now mobile friendly. As the WMF expands its mobile development projects its important to make sure that our established communications tools are mobile friendly as well. To do that we’ve enabled the mobile edition plugin for all of our blogs. Let us know how it looks.

I’m happy to report that we have a new beta version of Kiwix available for testing. For those new to the project, Kiwix is the simplest and easiest way to take Wikipedia with you when you have no internet connection.

We’ve added some features that I’ll talk about below but for those of you that are just looking to get involved: download a fresh copy and give us feedback. Head over to our project pages if you want to see our full roadmap.

With this new beta we have some exciting new features:

• Mac OS X version;
• Content Manager
• Revised search interface

While the majority of our user base is Linux and Windows we didn’t want OSX users to feel left out. It’s now part of our regular build process. Three platform builds per release .. that’s our goal.
We’re especially happy with how the content manager has turned out. Rather than having to scour the internet to find openZim files you’ll now be able to discover new ones right within Kiwix.

We’re starting out with a limited set of data files to simplify our testing, but we’ll be expanding in the next months as we connect the download manager to the Books collection extension. This will greatly expand the amount of content you can download from Wikipedia. With the extra content, we’ll also add filtering capabilities to make sorting easier.

Finally, we’ve tweaked the look and feel of search results. It’s now far more similar to search engine results pages, which will hopefully make both search and browse much easier.There are also lots of others change under the hood and for those curious head over to the change log.

Tomasz Finc
Director Mobile & Special Projects

Calling all mobile Wikipedia users! We’re happy to announce that the new Wikimedia Mobile prototype is ready for testing. Before enabling it, we need your help to test functionality and uncover bugs.

Please point your mobile browser over to our prototype sites, e.g. Wikipedia in English, in Japanese, or in Hebrew.

We have also imported a few stories from Wikinews for testing, in English ([1], [2], [3], [4]), Japanese ([1], [2], [3]) and Hebrew ([1], [2], [3], [4]).

When you’re done browsing, head over to our feedback page and let us know how it went.

Please keep in mind that our prototypes only contain a small subset of our content; you’re likely to see a lot of missing pages and templates (red links).

If you’re feeling especially brave and have found technical glitches, please file them directly in our bug tracker.

There are three possible experiences when loading the mobile gateway:

• We detect that you have a well-featured smart phone and show you the site exactly as m.wikipedia.org would;
• We detect that you have a WAP/WML-only phone and show you a paginated view;
• We don’t identify your phone as having a mobile browser and show you the PC version.

Our detection is based on the WURFL library; so if you find that your phone is not redirecting properly to the mobile version, please contribute your phone’s details to the WURFL project so that it is recognized in the future.

The new mobile prototype is a replacement for our current Ruby-based gateway; the prototype is implemented directly as a MediaWiki extension.

You can learn more about our mobile projects and future work by visiting our Mobile Projects page. If you are a developer and would like to get involved, check out the page detailing our work. And if you just want to say hello or give us some super quick feedback then join us on irc through freenode #wikimedia-mobile

Thank you for helping us test our mobile prototype!

Tomasz Finc
Engineering Program Manager — Mobile
Patrick Reilly
Senior Software Developer — Mobile