19 March 2005

Mobile Access to Wikipedia

Some nice folks from the New Zealand company Instinct, have created a mobile version of Wikipedia for mobile devices, currently available as a beta website.

As a result users of Pocket PCs, Smartphones and Java-enabled mobile phones running web browsers can now access a lightweight version of the Wikipedia on-line encyclopedia.

With over 1,025,291 entries it’s got pretty much everything users could want to know about, from mercantilism to New Zealand history to Fraggle Rock.

The developer says however that people shouldn't start quoting Wikipedia as the source of all truth though, since the entries are contributed by individuals in the community and aren’t checked by professionals before they’re published.

Apart from this > one < there are numerous other solutions for reading the Wikipedia on mobile devices, ports like: Wapipedia; Quickipedia; TomeRaider; Wapedia; German Wikipedia for Mobipocket; Wikipedia on your iPod and so long.

About Wiki:
Wikipedia is a multilingual Web-based free-content encyclopedia. It exists as a wiki, written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by anyone with access to a web browser and an Internet connection. The project began on January 15, 2001, as a complement to the expert-written (and now defunct) Nupedia, and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikipedia has more than 3,500,000 articles, including more than 1,000,000 in the English-language version. Since its inception, Wikipedia has steadily risen in popularity, and its success has spawned several sister projects. There has, however, been controversy over its reliability.

Wikipedia's slogan is "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" and the project is described by its co-founder Jimmy Wales as "an effort to create and distribute a multilingual free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language."[2] Collective authorship and understanding is the primal belief of being involved in a collective encyclopedia or wikipedia.