Dear Wikipedians,
a few weeks ago, my wife and I were hiking through the beautiful Swiss Alps and had a lively discussion about the definition of some absurd term. All we had with us was a cell phone. This was the birth of our idea: Wouldn't it be great if the Wikipedia content was accessible sending a simple SMS?
This is how we figured it might work: Send an SMS with the keyword (the term you want to look up) to a special number. The server will then access Wikipedia and return the abstract of the article. You will only get as much as will fit into an SMS, but in many cases, this will be enough.
In the first release of this service, the 'abstract' could be just whatever the article starts with. In the future, there might even be a specialized way in the Wikipedia to add such SMS-abstracts to an article.
I wrote this idea to Swisscom Mobile and got the answer that they would actually be interested to offer such a service. However, there would have to be a standardized gateway by Wikipedia to their Vodaphone live service. Other than that, it would not be implemented. The responsible manager made it clear that the phone company would not implement such a gateway, but that it would have to be done by Wikipedia.
And this is why I am writing this post. I am unable to go any further than this, because this is beyond my technical capabilities. All I can do is offer this idea and offer the contact with Swisscom Mobile. Perhaps someone can pick this up and make it happen? I think it would be a real win-win situation for both Wikipedia as well as any phone company that might choose to offer such a service.
Best regards, David Bruehlmeier (from Switzerland, but not affiliated in any way with Swisscom! :-)
david@bruehlmeier.com (david@bruehlmeier.com) [050628 19:19]:
This is how we figured it might work: Send an SMS with the keyword (the term you want to look up) to a special number. The server will then access Wikipedia and return the abstract of the article. You will only get as much as will fit into an SMS, but in many cases, this will be enough.
This idea has been thrown around for a while :-) You can be sure someone will implement it eventually. Probably using, as you say, the first 160 chrs of the article.
Perhaps this will lead to better-formed [[:en:Wikipedia:Lead summary]] sections ;-)
I understand there has also been discussion about this for Africa - where cellphones are much more common than Internet connections. And how to make editing via cellphone usable, since we're not a read-only encyclopedia.
(Hmm, what would the GFDL have to say about this?)
- d.
david@bruehlmeier.com wrote:
Dear Wikipedians,
Hoi David,
This is how we figured it might work: Send an SMS with the keyword (the term you want to look up) to a special number. The server will then access Wikipedia and return the abstract of the article. You will only get as much as will fit into an SMS, but in many cases, this will be enough.
The problem is that all articles start like this:
"Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) ...."
or:
"The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (established 1958) is ...."
What I mean to say is that the first sentence is alway very long but not very informative.
I wrote this idea to Swisscom Mobile and got the answer that they would actually be interested to offer such a service. However, there would have to be a standardized gateway by Wikipedia to their Vodaphone live service. Other than that, it would not be implemented. The responsible manager made it clear that the phone company would not implement such a gateway, but that it would have to be done by Wikipedia.
There are companies offering SMS to HTTP gateways. All you would have to do is write some PHP or Perl code that would reply to the SMS messages. For Switzerland, such SMS would cost around CHF 0.40 to 1.00, and you'd get about 20%-30% of that.
A real problem is that these services are normally only available in one country, so you'd have to make contracts for all the countries where you want to offer the service.
-Stephan
On Thu, 30 Jun 2005, Stephan Walter wrote:
The problem is that all articles start like this:
"Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) ...."
"The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (established 1958) is ...."
That's actually pretty darn informative, when I searched for "Einstine" or "NASA". What more would you want to know from the first 100 characters? I think this is almost optimal.
that, it would not be implemented. The responsible manager made it clear that the phone company would not implement such a gateway, but that it would have to be done by Wikipedia.
There are companies offering SMS to HTTP gateways. All you would have to
Well, we could also set up our own... there are apparently open source gateways out there that don't require too much in the way of hardware.
SJ
david@bruehlmeier.com:
Dear Wikipedians,
a few weeks ago, my wife and I were hiking through the beautiful Swiss Alps and had a lively discussion about the definition of some absurd term. All we had with us was a cell phone. This was the birth of our idea: Wouldn't it be great if the Wikipedia content was accessible sending a simple SMS?
Yes, though of course it requires compressing information a lot, even when concatenating multiple messages. [[World War I]] intro presently is 3465 characters by my count, 22 concatenated SMS messages with 160 characters max.
One project that is presently in the planning stage (as in, actual planning, not just on hold) is called MobiLed. We discussed this when Angela and I were in South Africa. The idea here is slightly different, namely, based on sending actual audio versions (spoken or machine-generated) to the user for free.
From http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Conference_reports/FLOSS%2C_South_Africa_2005
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Audio Wikipedia by cell phone
Interestingly enough, many areas of Africa have relatively high cell phone coverage. For example, according to a person working on cell phone services in Nigeria, there are 6-7 million users in that country alone. These are very simple devices without Internet access, but with SMS support.
It therefore seems like a good idea to make Wikipedia accessible to these devices. One obvious approach would be to send articles by SMS. However, SMS is very limited in size, and long articles would have to be split up into tens or even hundreds of messages. Teemu Leinonen of the University of Art and Design Helsinki is working on a project to create another access possibility: The user sends an SMS with the article title to a phone number. A few seconds later, they get a call on their cell phone with a spoken version of the article they requested. In most cases, this would be generated by text-to-speech software like Festival (which is free software), though a version spoken by a Wikipedian could be used if available. While listening to the spoken version, the user could use the keypad to navigate (fast-forward, skip to next/previous section, read only tabular data, etc.).
If the article does not exist, the user would be given a special message: "An article on this subject is not available. Would you like to record one?" These audio submissions would be automatically uploaded to the Commons and could be vetted and transcribed by volunteers.
The most important aspect of this idea is that it would make all of Wikipedia (and potentially other projects) immediately accessible, almost for free, to anyone with a cell phone. In order for it to work, the callback would have to be funded somehow. Teemu is seeking funding from major companies and institutions for this project as part of a larger project centering on Mobile Phones in Formal and Informal Learning. CSIR were interested in this project since they are developing open source speech recognition programmes to deal with African languages in the field of telephony. If the project does get funding, Wikimedia will be given the opportunity to be involved in terms of development, operation and organization.
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In developed countries, the callback could be paid for by the user, of course. (One idea is that users in developed countries could sponsor users in developing ones.) If you want to be involved, drop me or Angela a line and we'll get you in touch with the relevant people.
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
In developed countries, the callback could be paid for by the user, of course. (One idea is that users in developed countries could sponsor users in developing ones.) If you want to be involved, drop me or Angela a line and we'll get you in touch with the relevant people.
This is a great idea, and with a slight modification you wouldn't even have to worry about callback costs. Simply let the user call your number, then they type the keyword on their phone, you detect the beeps and immediately read the article.
You could get a toll number and start grubbing money for the Wikimedia servers ;-)
I'd like to get something like that to work... But still one problem would be that it's country-specific, and me living in a small country (Switzerland, and to make matters worse, there are 4 official languages), I'd have some problems getting a large audience/user base. Perhaps someone in the USA, Germany or France could set up such a system, to see how many people would actually use it.
On the technical side, are there already working solutions?
-Stephan
On 7/1/05, Stephan Walter stephan@walter.name wrote:
This is a great idea, and with a slight modification you wouldn't even have to worry about callback costs. Simply let the user call your number, then they type the keyword on their phone, you detect the beeps and immediately read the article.
I like the idea about encouraging the listener to economize on time spent listening; less load on the servers for those "Origins of the American Civil War" -length articles.
You could get a toll number and start grubbing money for the Wikimedia servers ;-)
"Call to hear our lovely readers read DIRECTLY TO YOU! Only $0.99 a minute..."
This would certainly be a lovely project; particularly the "would you like to record one?" part. On the other hand, the trick will most often be finding ways to search for related information when a close title-match is not found.
Stephan Walter:
This is a great idea, and with a slight modification you wouldn't even have to worry about callback costs. Simply let the user call your number, then they type the keyword on their phone, you detect the beeps and immediately read the article.
The point is to have toll-free access in developing countries. This could be accomplished through a toll-free number as well, though.
Best,
Erik
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