[sent to foundation-l and wikitech-l]
wap.fluffypeople.com/wiki , a third-party WAP translator for Wikipedia, is gone and not coming back.
How did I find this out? A "problem manager" for Hutchison 3G just called me! 'Cos the volunteer press contact is obviously the person to call about this sort of thing.
Apparently, Hutchison promote Wikipedia as one of the things you can get through their service. And apparently they were just hooking into this third-party volunteer service. If you go to http://wap.fluffypeople.com/wiki/ and read the WML file, the text it gives is:
"Sorry folks, the interface to wikipedia is down for the forseeable future. There's a bug that crashes the webserver, and I don't have free wap access any more, so I've got no incentive to fix it. I hope you have enjoyed using the service."
Apparently a Hutchison director saw that message and didn't understand that it wasn't us. And this guy read that message and didn't twig that it wasn't us. Ahem.
As it happened I knew the right answer - "that'll be a third party translator, we don't supply a WAP version of Wikipedia, just the web version. If you want to run a WAP service, then you should contact fluffypeople and pay them to run the service for you, or you should get your own sysadmins to run the service for you."
ANYWAY - it occurred to me that if we want to make Wikimedia projects available to people - should we run our own WAP server? Or supply a suitable feed or software as a paid feed for phone companies who want to sell this to their customers? Or get them to give us the access to supply knowledge to the world this way?
(Given our fundraiser shortfall, options that involve money coming to WMF are probably the nicest.)
Does any of this sound at all feasible? Not that I'm volunteering for the project ... just floating the idea.
- d.
Isn't there something called Wapipedia to search WP? I'm pretty sure I've seen a link to it from my network's content pages.
Personally, I don't see the need for it. I use Opera Mini on my phone to browse WP and occasionally edit.
The 3G phones can all surely run Opera or even simply the phone's native browser - Symbian-based, some of them.
On 1/18/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
[sent to foundation-l and wikitech-l]
wap.fluffypeople.com/wiki , a third-party WAP translator for Wikipedia, is gone and not coming back.
How did I find this out? A "problem manager" for Hutchison 3G just called me! 'Cos the volunteer press contact is obviously the person to call about this sort of thing.
Apparently, Hutchison promote Wikipedia as one of the things you can get through their service. And apparently they were just hooking into this third-party volunteer service. If you go to http://wap.fluffypeople.com/wiki/ and read the WML file, the text it gives is:
"Sorry folks, the interface to wikipedia is down for the forseeable future. There's a bug that crashes the webserver, and I don't have free wap access any more, so I've got no incentive to fix it. I hope you have enjoyed using the service."
Apparently a Hutchison director saw that message and didn't understand that it wasn't us. And this guy read that message and didn't twig that it wasn't us. Ahem.
As it happened I knew the right answer - "that'll be a third party translator, we don't supply a WAP version of Wikipedia, just the web version. If you want to run a WAP service, then you should contact fluffypeople and pay them to run the service for you, or you should get your own sysadmins to run the service for you."
ANYWAY - it occurred to me that if we want to make Wikimedia projects available to people - should we run our own WAP server? Or supply a suitable feed or software as a paid feed for phone companies who want to sell this to their customers? Or get them to give us the access to supply knowledge to the world this way?
(Given our fundraiser shortfall, options that involve money coming to WMF are probably the nicest.)
Does any of this sound at all feasible? Not that I'm volunteering for the project ... just floating the idea.
- d.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
I use Wapedia. I really like it.
Gary Kirk wrote:
Isn't there something called Wapipedia to search WP? I'm pretty sure I've seen a link to it from my network's content pages.
Personally, I don't see the need for it. I use Opera Mini on my phone to browse WP and occasionally edit.
The 3G phones can all surely run Opera or even simply the phone's native browser - Symbian-based, some of them.
On 1/18/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
[sent to foundation-l and wikitech-l]
wap.fluffypeople.com/wiki , a third-party WAP translator for Wikipedia, is gone and not coming back.
How did I find this out? A "problem manager" for Hutchison 3G just called me! 'Cos the volunteer press contact is obviously the person to call about this sort of thing.
Apparently, Hutchison promote Wikipedia as one of the things you can get through their service. And apparently they were just hooking into this third-party volunteer service. If you go to http://wap.fluffypeople.com/wiki/ and read the WML file, the text it gives is:
"Sorry folks, the interface to wikipedia is down for the forseeable future. There's a bug that crashes the webserver, and I don't have free wap access any more, so I've got no incentive to fix it. I hope you have enjoyed using the service."
Apparently a Hutchison director saw that message and didn't understand that it wasn't us. And this guy read that message and didn't twig that it wasn't us. Ahem.
As it happened I knew the right answer - "that'll be a third party translator, we don't supply a WAP version of Wikipedia, just the web version. If you want to run a WAP service, then you should contact fluffypeople and pay them to run the service for you, or you should get your own sysadmins to run the service for you."
ANYWAY - it occurred to me that if we want to make Wikimedia projects available to people - should we run our own WAP server? Or supply a suitable feed or software as a paid feed for phone companies who want to sell this to their customers? Or get them to give us the access to supply knowledge to the world this way?
(Given our fundraiser shortfall, options that involve money coming to WMF are probably the nicest.)
Does any of this sound at all feasible? Not that I'm volunteering for the project ... just floating the idea.
- d.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On 1/18/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
ANYWAY - it occurred to me that if we want to make Wikimedia projects available to people - should we run our own WAP server? Or supply a suitable feed or software as a paid feed for phone companies who want to sell this to their customers? Or get them to give us the access to supply knowledge to the world this way?
(Given our fundraiser shortfall, options that involve money coming to WMF are probably the nicest.)
Does any of this sound at all feasible? Not that I'm volunteering for the project ... just floating the idea.
I like the Wapedia project [1] a lot - it supports a lot of languages (most languages with more than 1000 articles), and is (afaik) non-commercial, and is, of course, a really handy tool. How about giving it "official status" and financial support?
On 18/01/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
(...)
ANYWAY - it occurred to me that if we want to make Wikimedia projects available to people - should we run our own WAP server? Or supply a suitable feed or software as a paid feed for phone companies who want to sell this to their customers? Or get them to give us the access to supply knowledge to the world this way?
We have been contacted about a direct feed for such services in the past - it's a not uncommon mail to info-en - but I don't know if we ever arranged something with anyone in the end.
wapedia.org and wapipedia.org have both run similar mirrors - might be worth seeing what they're up to, as well.
Running our own en-wap.wikipedia.org (or something) would be a lot of hassle from the technical side, but an interesting one to try.
Hi,
David Gerard schrieb am 18.01.2007 21:32:
ANYWAY - it occurred to me that if we want to make Wikimedia projects available to people - should we run our own WAP server? Or supply a suitable feed or software as a paid feed for phone companies who want to sell this to their customers? Or get them to give us the access to supply knowledge to the world this way?
Perhaps interesting: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unterwegs (well, it's german).
For example the solution by Sevenval: http://en.wikipedia.7val.com/
... or wapedia: http://wapedia.mobi/en/
Have fun, Tim.
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org