Wikimedia Foundation's Mobile Site Caters to Android, iPhone

The Wikimedia Foundation is presenting a new site formatted for mobile phones, found here. It features a cleaner, less cluttered interface that allows mobile users to get more readable versions of Wikipedia entries. It currently supports Android phones and the iPhone. In addition, the Wikimedia Foundation is looking for open source help in developing the effort.

According to the Wikimedia Foundation announcement:

"The new gateway is written entirely in Ruby (using the Merb framework) and the Git repository can be found here. We are looking for open source help with supporting other phone types and translations into new languages. Currently 8 languages are supported, but we'd like to support all languages Wikipedia supports. This is an active project and we are looking for new features, etc. from the community."

Readers of the announcement commenting on Slashdot mostly welcomed the new interface, and there were some whimsical replies such as: "Shake phone to shuffle 'citation needed' tags around page."

Despite Wikipedia's occasional inaccuracies, it has grown up to be a useful tool. It's good to see an optimized mobile edition of it.