After a lot of analysis, discussions and preparations, today we announce that WAP/WML support has been removed from MobileFrontend. Our sites were running HTML only for a couple weeks now, so since we received no complaints, we pulled the trigger. Final deprectation might take a couple more weeks, but we're already beyond the point of no return.
I would like to thak everyone who participated in this effort!
This wasn't an easy decision, however the share of WAP has fallen tremendously and we can find better use for engineering resources we would have needed to maintain WAP support functional.
Max Semenik wrote:
I would like to thank everyone who participated in this effort!
This wasn't an easy decision, however the share of WAP has fallen tremendously and we can find better use for engineering resources we would have needed to maintain WAP support functional.
RIP, WAP.
It seems http://en.wap.wikipedia.org/ now redirects to en.m.wikipedia.org (nice!), but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Mobile_access has become kind of Orwellian (boo). At least there's the page history. :-)
It probably bears repeating that MediaWiki has a robust Web API, which MobileFrontend and sibling extensions, contribute to. The API provides real-time access to a trove of metadata regarding users, articles, edits, etc. in addition to providing the wikitext markup, parsed HTML, and even text extracts from pages. If anyone is interested in re-using the content of a MediaWiki wiki to set up a WAP-like service or something more interesting, it shouldn't be too difficult. More info:
* https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API * https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php
This somewhat softens the blow of the various WAP services going away.
MZMcBride
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org