[Foundation-l] Access Wikipedia through SMS

[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?

This is how we figured it might work: Send an SMS with the keyword (the term you
want to look up) to a special number. The server will then access Wikipedia and
return the abstract of the article. You will only get as much as will fit into
an SMS, but in many cases, this will be enough.

In the first release of this service, the 'abstract' could be just whatever the
article starts with. In the future, there might even be a specialized way in
the Wikipedia to add such SMS-abstracts to an article.

I wrote this idea to Swisscom Mobile and got the answer that they would actually
be interested to offer such a service. However, there would have to be a
standardized gateway by Wikipedia to their Vodaphone live service. Other than
that, it would not be implemented. The responsible manager made it clear that
the phone company would not implement such a gateway, but that it would have to
be done by Wikipedia.

And this is why I am writing this post. I am unable to go any further than this,
because this is beyond my technical capabilities. All I can do is offer this
idea and offer the contact with Swisscom Mobile. Perhaps someone can pick this
up and make it happen? I think it would be a real win-win situation for both
Wikipedia as well as any phone company that might choose to offer such a
service.

Best regards,
David Bruehlmeier
(from Switzerland, but not affiliated in any way with Swisscom! :-)