david(a)bruehlmeier.com wrote: Hoi David, 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. 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

david(a)bruehlmeier.com: 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 - - - - - 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. - - - - - 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