Although Wikipedia does not provide official access for wireless devices such as mobile telephones, four Wikipedia users have each provided a mechanism by which it is possible to gain quick access to text-only versions of articles using the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP).
Comments and suggestions regarding these interfaces should be added to the discussion page for this article.
Access information
All four methods are listed here, both to provide a choice and so that access can continue if any one should become unavailable. Only one need be chosen, and the corresponding address, or URL, would normally be entered as a bookmark in a wireless device (as opposed to being used with a PC). Please note that for the first three no search engine is available – the name of the starting article must either be known in advance or guessed correctly.
- http://wap.fluffypeople.com/wiki
- http://www.deth.dsl.pipex.com/wiki.wml
- http://wp.alf.nu/search term
- http://en.wapedia.org
The first two URLs provide a search box into which a query may be entered, however the first should be used preferentially as it provides considerably more intelligent translation of the article pages. The second URL breaks the articles into smaller chunks, which may be better suited to certain devices.
The second and third URLs require an exact page name to be entered, as follows.
- Entry is case sensitive, for example Test rather than test, WML rather than Wml.
- Underscores or plus symbols may need to be entered between words, for example John_Titor or John+Titor rather than John Titor.
When Wikipedia is under heavy load it may be slow in returning pages, which can cause the wireless connection or gateway to time-out and produce an error message.
The last URL has its own database server which is independent from the Wikipedia servers and provides a search facility. Long pages are separated into smaller chunks. A description of the service can be found at http://www.en.wapedia.org.
Technical details
The first interface, http://wap.fluffypeople.com/wiki, has been written using Perl to translate Wikipedia pages to WML as reliably as possible. Access is logged by IP address. The http://wp.alf.nu interface merely provides a shorter URL for the first interface, bypassing the form.
The second interface, http://www.deth.dsl.pipex.com/wiki.wml, is simply a WML page – shown below – that may be stored on any suitably-configured web server. When accessed using a suitable device, it will allow the name of an existing Wikipedia article to be entered and retrieved. It works by fetching the article via Google's WML proxy server which translates the article from HTML to a sequence of WML pages. Access is not logged.
<?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN" "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml"> <wml> <card title="Wikipedia.org"> <p> Google proxy <input emptyok="true" name="q"/> <a href="http://wmlproxy.google.com/wmltrans/h=en/u=http@3A@2F@2Fen.wikipedia.org@2Fwiki@2F$(q)/c=0">Go!</a> </p> </card> </wml>