New mobile site launched on Wikipedia, soon for sister wikis too.

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Thanks to Patrick Reilly, Asher Feldman, many volunteers developers, and lots of testers, we’ve now launched our new Mobile gateway, powered by the MobileFrontend MediaWiki extension. It is enabled on Wikipedia, and will be rolled out to its sister sites gradually.
The launch went very smoothly, and barring any major issue in the next weeks, we’ll take off the beta icon. We’ve learned a ton about WURFL, Varnish, X-Device-Headers, and more in making this launch happen. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below or mail us at mobile@wikimedia.org.

Mobile - FA


With this change, we’re saying thank you to our Ruby & Hawhaw mobile gateways and retiring them in favor of a simpler php extension. Many thanks to Hampton Caitlin, theDJ, and everyone who has helped run our old gateways over the last couple of years. Combined, the Ruby & Hawhaw gateways have served hundreds of millions of users each month and have been an integral part of our mobile ecosystem.
Moving forward, we’ll be developing MobileFrontend as our primary mobile interface. Our future mobile projects, involving offline, editing, uploads, etc., will all in some way interact with the extension. We’re eager to see more developers working on it, along with getting broader usage of it within the various Wikimedia projects and beyond.
With MobileFrontend, we now have the ability to easily allow not only Wikipedia but our sister projects to have a mobile friendly view. No longer will it just be Wikipedia that has a mobile view.
Here are a couple of examples:

I’m really excited to see how all of the Wikimedia projects embrace mobile as a new way of surfacing amazing freely licensed content.
One area where we could use some help is to create the home pages for these projects. Right now they look like this: http://en.m.wikinews.org. Creating these pages is easy and you can find information about how to get started on meta. Once we have a couple more home pages created, we can start to make the mobile view be the default for these projects.
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, join us on IRC on freenode in #wikimedia-mobile.
Come help make Wikimedia projects on Mobile better for everyone.
Image (3) en.m-qr-code.png for post 6322
 
Tomasz Finc
Director of Mobile and Special Projects

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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[…] Wikipedia pushed a new mobile interface live today and though end-users probably won't be able to tell the difference (except the new Beta label) – it's the start of something big. The new mobile front end framework that's been pushed live, called MobileFrontend, replaces an older less agile front end for the mobile site and aims to enable a host of new developments. […]

[…] Wikipedia pushed a new mobile interface live today and though end-users probably won't be able to tell the difference (except the new Beta label) – it's the start of something big. The new mobile front end framework that's been pushed live, called MobileFrontend, replaces an older less agile front end for the mobile site and aims to enable a host of new developments. […]

This is timely, given the growing attention paid to the QRpedia project , which uses QR codes to deliver mobile-Wikipedia pages in the user’s preferred language.

…and the missing URL is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QRpedia !

[…] 2011.09 15维基百科开始移动蓝图的部署 骆柱(drooloo) 发表于 上午 8:55 维基百科在今天推出了一个新的移动界面,尽管对我来说除了Beta的标签外并没有什么不同的地方,但是这确实维基百科移动蓝图的开始。这个被称为“MobileFrontend”的新的移动前端架构,将会取代灵活性较低的旧的移动页面,这都是为了可以支持大量的新的扩展。首先,新的移动前端将跨越维基百科所有的关联网站和项目展开部署,而目前仅仅是维基百科有一个专门的移动界面。其次,新的移动前端也将会支持即将要实现的移动扩展,譬如移动编辑、移动设备图片上传、手机离线支持等等。一直以来,移动对于维基百科来说都只是一个二等公民,不过从移动维基百科的未来发展方向来看,这或许会有所改变。仅仅在前天,维基百科还和Ushahidi 达成合作,新建一个应用SwiftRiver,帮助维基百科的编辑们更容易从堆积如山的实时新闻当中获取有用的信息。结合这一次的移动平台的推出,不难看出,维基百科在酝酿着一次巨大的变动。移动编辑和图片上传的支持,会使得未来的维基百科更加的具有包容性和实时性。via RWW […]

Awesome news! So exciting. I’m so happy that when people email me asking if they can run their own mobile version of a wiki, I can now proudly say HELLZ YES!
Amazing work by Patrick and team.
My poor overworked servers can now expect a long retirement elsewhere in the WMF clusters.
-hampton.

I’ll raise this as a bug, but I think it bears mentioning here.
Currently, the viewport is set to “width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=0”
This means users can’t zoom in on the text – which makes it very hard to use for those with poor eye-sight (or small screens).
Is there any technical reason for this?
Great work, btw, very impressed with the speed.

Yes, not being able to zoom is a problem. Why not user-scalable=yes ?

The mobile site doesn’t seem to work on my Blackberry. Clicking the “Show” buttons in the body of the article doesn’t open what it says it will. Instead it takes you to a totally random article. I live on Wikipedia, so this is incredibly frustrating. I have many friends with Blackberries, and they all have the same problem. I read a forum post earlier that was answered by someone from Wikipedia, and he said the problem was in the person’s phone. That doesn’t seem likely, considering the same problem is identical on multiple phones.

[…] Som vi har skrivit tidigare är Wikipedia det mest tillgängliga uppslagsverket, och den första träffen när man söker på nätet. Nu börjar det dessutom märkas att Wikipedia satsar stort på att bli ännu tillgängligare. Som ReadWriteWeb berättar har Wikimedia Foundation nyligen lanserat en ny betaversion av den mobila varianten av Wikipedia, som ska vara stabilare och lättare att redigera, men framför allt gör det lättare att gå vidare till nästa steg i utvecklingen. Läs mer på Wikimedia Foundations teknikblogg. […]

I have the same problem mentioned by Dusty Rhodes (sept 16); when I click on a “show” button, I am redirected to a totally random and unrelated article. I also have a blackberry.

[…] إطلاق نسخة جديدة لموسوعة ويكيبيديا الخاصة بالهواتف […]

Ditto. Clicking the “Show” button takes you to a random article, completely unrelated to the article you are looking at. Very frustrating as I also use Wikipedia frequently. This seems to be an issue with any Blackberry that attempts to use the mobile site. 🙁

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[…] Ya hay Wikipedia para sitios móviles. […]

Show buttons do not work on iPod touch.

Had to disable the mobile site. It’s become completely useless due to the show buttons no longer working under iOS.

When be released mobile editing Wikipedia?

The “Show” buttons on the mobile pages don’t work, making it impossible to actually read articles. How do I fix this?

The “show” buttons do nothing on the iPhone. They have been working up until now.

Mobile site doesn’t work with firefox or built in browser on my droid x. Clicking “show” buttons does nothing.

Show button doesn’t work on Android either (does nothing).

[…] from their mobile phones Wikipedia needs to become increasingly mobile. Recently we wrote about the new mobile frontend but how do you get to a Wikipedia article in the first place, especially if you don’t know what […]

[…] from their mobile phones Wikipedia needs to become increasingly mobile. Recently we wrote about the new mobile frontend but how do you get to a Wikipedia article in the first place, especially if you don’t know what […]

[…] deployment of our new mobile front-end, now the default mobile […]

[…] their mobile phones, Wikipedia needs to become increasingly mobile. Wikipedia recently created a new mobile front end but how do you get to a Wikipedia article in the first place, especially if you don’t know what […]

Lack of zoom function (using curve 9300) liteally makes this app the antithesis of a mobile site: You can’t read it on a mobile phone!

It won’t let me zoom in on most pages. And before the beta it would.