Help:Mobile access
Wikipedia (mobile) - click to view Wikipedia on a mobile device
It is possible to access Wikipedia on wireless devices such as mobile phones and PDAs. Several methods exist for this and each has advantages and disadvantages.
Official mobile access
Mobile version of the site
Official Mobile English Wikipedia. Users of supported mobile devices are automatically redirected to the official mobile version of Wikipedia.
- Supported: iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, WebOS, Opera Mini, NetFront (Sony Ericsson phones, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3), Wii, and numerous others.
This mobile version is available for all languages of Wikipedia. It is actively developed, supported and translated. Editing and image uploading are not yet supported; you may want to use the desktop version or a third party solution as alternatives. If you don't want to use the mobile version, you can find options at the bottom of every page to switch to the desktop version or disable the mobile version permanently on your device. If you have permanently disabled the automatic redirect to the mobile interface and have since changed your mind, you can use the Mobile view-link in the footer of every Wikipedia page to restore the automatic redirect behavior.
- Wikipedia mobile website
- Email, Twitter, Mobile-l mailing list
- Report a new bug and List of known bugs
- Mobile Projects portal page, Mobile engineering status page
Many older phones have poor browsers. If yours is Java ME-capable, you might consider installing Opera Mini, a Java ME-based Internet browser for mobile phones. Opera Mini has a built-in Wikipedia search facility.
-
Wikipedia mobile on Opera Mini 5.
-
Wikipedia mobile on Android 2.2
Official Application
Technical resources: mailing list and bug lists linked above, Support and Development at GitHub, iPhone app page at Wikitech.
iOS
The official iOS application from the Wikimedia Foundation is called "Wikipedia Mobile". It is free and provides a read-only version of Wikipedia, similar to the mobile web version of Wikipedia. It also allows you to find geotagged articles near your current location.
Android
The official Android application from the Wikimedia Foundation is called "Wikipedia". It is free and provides a read-only version of Wikipedia, similar to the mobile web version of Wikipedia. It also allows you to find geotagged articles near your current location.
BlackBerry
The official BlackBerry application from the Wikimedia Foundation can be downloaded from BlackBerry World.
Windows
The official Windows 8 application from the Wikimedia Foundation can be downloaded from Windows Store.
Regular site
If a browser is installed for general use, it can be used to access the general Wikipedia site, also for editing, depending on limitations of the browser. One may want to adapt the user style and preferences to optimize them for the mobile device. For example, navigation popups may or may not be convenient on the mobile device.
Mobile website versions
The official mobile version of Wikipedia is located at http://m.wikipedia.org. However, many users and developers have created their websites for reading Wikipedia on a variety of mobile devices.
Wapedia
One of the most prominent Wikipedia portals for mobile devices is Wapedia. Having started in August 2004, Wapedia offers the recent version of every article. Next to Wikipedia, it can provide access to the sister projects Wiktionary, Wikiquote and many other popular wikis. Wapedia pages currently contain advertisements inserted by the site's owners.[1] It supports a wide range of devices and even some of the oldest mobile devices can be used to access Wikipedia through this website.
Sevenval
Sevenval AG offers a free real-time transformation of the current Wikipedia. The link to the service is http://wikipedia.7val.com. It offers a full-blown version of Wikipedia for all kinds of mobile devices. This enables mobile users to edit articles and administer their personal accounts. Wikipedia's sister projects – Wiktionary, etc. – can be accessed via this service as well. 50 languages of Wikipedia are supported. [2]
The following features are currently available.
- Device recognition of mobiles, smartphones, PDAs, etc., which enables the individualized adaptation of the presentation transmitted to different types of devices.
- Complete administration of articles including editing, history, discussions, etc.
- Complete administration of user accounts and automatic login if cookies are allowed.
- Automatic language recognition at Wikipedia.7val.com.
- Direct access to 50 language by using a URL prefix, for example http://en.wikipedia.7val.com for English and http://fi.wikipedia.7val.com for Finnish. A list of languages can found here.
- Wikipedia by Sevenval
HAWHAW
A free real-time mobile-adapted Wikipedia browser provided by HAWHAW at http://mobile.wikipedia.org minimizes images and presents article text in pieces of approximately 7 kb to facilitate transfer. In standard browser, often hundreds of kb are transferred when opening an article. HAWHAW is suitable for slow or expensive Internet access, as well as devices with a small screen, but may well be used in all conditions to get a quick introduction to various concepts, which is usually provided in the first 7 kb, making downloading of further pieces mostly unnecessary.
HAWHAW stands for HTML and WML hybrid adapted Webserver.
It does not give spelling suggestions for slightly misspelled terms, and does not support tables.
Pediaphon
A computer-generated audio (speech synthesis) version of all Wikipedia articles is provided by the Pediaphon service. It is usable on- and off-line with common MP3 players, PDAs, cell phones (WAP) and with every phone via voice call. Pediaphon can be used as a location-based service.
Miniwiki
Miniwiki is a simple mobile site for Pocket PC and Palm device. It synchronizes its content with Wikipedia at real time.
BabelServer
Automatic conversion from HTML to WML is not really a «version» of Wikipedia, but is still worth mentioning. Some projects offer transcoding software (e.g. Coldjava's h2W servlet), while others offer the transcoding online and on the fly (e.g. BabelServer).
Applications
Official apps
These are, of course, free:
iPhone applications
Many iPhone applications exist for browsing Wikipedia. All the applications so far are read-only versions of Wikipedia. Currently, the only ways to edit Wikipedia on an iPhone are to access it via Safari or Google Chrome. The links will open the iTunes Store:
| Name | Price | Can edit? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia Mobile | Free | No | Official Wikipedia iPhone application |
| WikiGear Free | Free | No | Different interface, specially designed for multilingual users; offline version in development |
| Wapedia | Free | No | |
| WikiPDA | $0.99 | No | |
| Wikiamo | Free | No | |
| Daily Wiki | Free | No | |
| WikiWiki | Free | No | |
| Wiki! lite | Free | No | |
| Wiki! pro | $0.99 | No | |
| Simplepedia | Free | No | |
| Simplepedia Plus | $1.99 | No | |
| Wikipanion | Free | No | |
| Wikipanion Plus | $4.99 | No | |
| iWiki | $1.99 | No | |
| Icy Wiki | $2.99 | No | |
| Wiki Offline | $1.99 | No | |
| Wiki Encyclopedia | $1.99 | No | |
| Encyclopedia | $2.99 | No | |
| TiniWiki encyclopedia | $5.99 | No | |
| Wikipedia Offline | $8.99 | No | Specially designed for offline access and late night viewing |
| All Of Wikipedia – Offline | $9.99 | No | Specially designed for offline access |
| Respotter Wiki | Free | No | Shows geotagged articles in Google Maps |
| WikiRadar | Free | No | Searches for geotagged articles near your current location |
| WikiAround | Free | No | Searches for geotagged articles near your current location |
| Wikihood | Free | No | Searches for geotagged articles near your current location |
| Wikihood Plus | $4.99 | No | Searches for geotagged articles near your current location |
| WikiMe | $0.99 | No | Searches for geotagged articles near your current location |
| NearestWiki | $1.99 | No | Searches for geotagged articles near your current location |
| WikiTrend | $0.99 | No | Shows most accessed articles from the past few hours |
| Wiki Hunt | $1.99 | No | Game where goal is to get from one random article to another in the least amount of clicks |
| WikiQuiz Lite | Free | No | Game where you must read articles with the titles omitted and guess the article titles |
| WikiQuiz | $0.99 | No | Game where you must read articles with the titles omitted and guess the article titles |
| Wikipedia Random Article of the Day | $0.99 | No | Provides a random article |
| WikiFlow | Free | No | "Random Wikipedia articles flow in and out of the screen" |
| Wiki Tap | Freeart | No | Search several sites including YouTube, Wikipedia and dictionaries |
| WikiSnail | $0.99 | No | "WikiBrowser" designed for MediaWiki wikis (including Wikipedia) |
| Minipedia - Offline Encyclopedia | Free | No | Contains the 100.000 most read articles; multilanguage support: English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish |
| Articles | $4.99 | No |
Android applications
- See all "Wikipedia" apps in the Google Play store (formerly known as the Android Market)
Wiktionary
BlackBerry applications
Symbian applications
- WikiOnBoard Offline reader for ZIM files, WMF's format to exchange compressed wiki data between all platforms and reader applications
- WikiPock for Symbian
- Mopedi for Symbian offline, includes images, geotagged article lookup.
Windows Mobile applications
Multiplatform applications
Boopsie
A read only version of Wikipedia is available at http://wikipedia.boopsie.com/. This mobile phone download supports BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Symbian S60, J2ME, Android, and iPhone. (A BREW version is available but must be side-loaded.)
WikiPock
WikiPock is a mobile application that provides offline access to all Wikipedia articles in 22 languages for Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Android and Symbian OS mobile phones. All the articles are stored in the mobile phone's memory.
Evopedia
Evopedia is an application that provides offline access to all Wikipedia articles in differents languages for Maemo, SHR, Windows, Ubuntu.
E-Book readers
Amazon Kindle
Amazon Kindle (3G versions) have the free access to Wikipedia content through mobile phone network on the "experimental browser" included in Kindle software. All content is shown in black-and-white (all colored images and graphs are converted).
EPub encyclopaedias
The Wiki-as-Ebook project provides massive encyclopaedias for E-Book-readers created from a large set of Wikipedia articles (commercial; 2013). Colored images are converted to grayscale.
iPad
There are a number of Wikipedia applications developed for the iPad. Most of them are geared toward enhancing the reading experience, but at least one app is built specifically to enable contribution (editing and photo uploads).
- Free
- Simplepedia offers a clean reading interface, in-text search, and content navigation
- For purchase
- Wiki Edit enables editing (with or without a markup assistance toolbar), photo uploads, and navigation to watchlist and user pages
- Wikihood allows you to search for specific types of articles (businesses, landmarks, popular) in a given location
- Wikipanion plus offers advanced searching, saving, and language selection tools
- Articles offers saving, searching, nearby, and a customizable toolbar
See also
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Wikipedia on PDAs and mobile phones |
- MediaWiki:Handheld.css – specific stylesheet for mobile devices
- mw:Extension:MobileFrontend – extension that defines the interface displayed for mobile devices
- Help:Multilingual support for Android
References
- ^ Wapedia.mobi - Homepage. Retrieved 2010-02-18.
- ^ "Sevenval: Wikipedia:". Retrieved 2008-02-25.
Read in another language
Last modified on 25 April 2013, at 05:20
