Hi all,

Needless to repeat the <India-Indic-Mobile-Growth> story. But I was surprised even with that, many Indic wikipedias do not have a mobile site(or some have gone dead since they failed to update for MobileFrontend[1] changes), even the ones that had weren't very much usable. Lets not cite, mobile phones do not have fonts, no one uses Indic on mobile, we all know lot of people do use Opera-mini with complex script rendering support.

* Please visit <yourlanguage>.m.wikpedia.org and see if there is a page. If it has nothing but 'search, license, and action control' links, here[2] are the steps that an admin need to do to get a mobile site running with content. If you have problem in doing those, come and ask at #wikimedia-tech (or #mediawiki {?}).

* When I visited Tamil wikipedia mobile site, I was restricted to content that was put on mainpage, the links in it. Since my Symbian phone doesnt have Indic input system, I cant search anything. The solution to this is to have a list of articles in alphabetical order *and* display it in mobile front page, like Assamese wikipedians have done[3]. Many Indic wikis have this template, but few show it on main page. This might be incredibly useful on mobile versions.

More thoughts on improving Mobile sites welcome :)

Mobile sites are important since,

1. Lot of people will be using this.
2. The Wikipedia app uses this(?) [Correct me if am wrong]

[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MobileFrontend
[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Projects/Mobile_Gateway#Mobile_homepage 
[3] http://as.m.wikipedia.org/

--
Regards
Srikanth.L