Although Wikipedia does not provide official access for wireless devices such as mobile telephones, it is possible to gain quick access to a text-only version of an article using the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP).
The following WML page may be stored on a web server and, 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.
<?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>
For convenience, the page is available at the following ___location – this address is intended to be entered as a bookmark in a wireless device.
<tt>http://www.deth.dsl.pipex.com/wiki.wml</tt>
Please note that this is not a search engine – the exact title of an article must be entered.
- Entry is case sensitive, for example Test rather than test, WML rather than Wml.
- Underscores or + must be entered between words on some cell phones, for example 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.
For direct access to a given page you can type the following short URL:
wp.alf.nu/search term