[Foundation-l] Access Wikipedia through SMS

[Erik Moeller]

david at 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