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
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