Saturday, February 20, 2010

Getting ready for new business

A #wikipedia in the Karachay-Balkar language is imminent. It is waiting in the incubator for the word of the board and, then we will seek its creation. It sports some 900 articles, the complete MediaWiki core has been localised and, what really shows their determination to succeed; they just completed the localisation for the Mobile MediaWiki as well.


What I learned this week:
  • People do not know that http://en.m.wikipedia.org is Wikipedia optimised for mobile phones
  • For 24 Wikipedias the mobile interface (24 messages) is completely localised
  • four languages were completed this week !!
  • The localisation for languages like French and Hebrew is not complete
  • Support for right to left languages like Urdu and Arabic is about to be implemented ...
  • The Indonesian interface is a bit sparse .. how to prettify this
  • People do not know about improved mobile access so they do not use it
  • The strategy project expects a lot of traffic from mobiles in the third world
  • There is no logo for Wikipedia Mobile
  • How do we serve Wiktionary, or other projects on the mobile
  • Wikia has its own mobile implementation
  • ... there is probably much more to know
Thanks,
GerardM

3 comments:

Dami said...

I have tried Wikipedia on my non-smart mobile a couple of times and what was disappointing that the site didn't automatically redirect to the version optimised for mobiles and that the url is very long to type (18 characters to type on a keypad takes sime time...).

GerardM said...

Hoi, it is three characters more then standard Wikipedia.. There are noises that they want to automate the redirect..

I think your Wikipedia can use some prettyfication as well :)
Thanks,
Gerard

Dami said...

Obviously the WP part is long (on my phone 25 keystrokes + language prefix + mobile prefix); a handy abbreviation would serve nicely (e.g. wp.org).

(Yeah the hu homepage could use some work, although it sure is fast... :)