Wikipedia, one of the greatest collaborative volunteer collective knowledge projects of all time and one of the most visited sites on the web, has finally released a mobile-formatted site – mobile.wikipedia.org. Although it may have already existed in some unofficial capacity, the mobile site is now officially available.
The official mobile Wikipedia offers text-only results in fourteen different languages. Images are strategically excluded from articles to cut down on page load times and as part of an effort to better account for speed/bandwidth variations across different mobile networks.
Mobile Wikipedia may not be as flashy as some of its Apple App Store competition, but its free, its official, and it should work on just about any mobile device that can connect to the cloud.
[via ReadWriteWeb]
I already enjoy Powerset’s take on Wikipedia. Free as well.
Actually the mobile version of Wikipedia is not new, it was launched last year. It’s not completely text-only either. Many of the images on the full site appear on the mobile one too. The “Tokyo” article, for example has over a dozen images in the mobile version.
I much prefer Wapedia.mobi though, It’s faster and does a better job of preserving the look and feel of the original.Wikipedia front-end
love the wikipedia. don’t know how i would get through life without it