[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.