Mobile Wikipedia officially launched
Mobile Wikipedia has been officially launched. The new service allows users to view Wikipedia pages on mobile devices by reformatting Wikipedia content to a simpler format. Although there are mobile applications that allow access to Wikipedia content, this is the first service provided by Wikipedia itself. Examination of the settings by ReadWriteWeb suggested that the service may be joined in the future by a "Spoken" version of Wikipedia.
Mobile Wikipedia is powered by HawHaw, a GPL licensed set of PHP libraries, a PHP based proxy and a JSP tag library. HawHaw, which stands for "HTML and WML hybrid adapted Webserver" has a simple demonstration of its features at wap.hawhaw.de. Among the features HawHaw has is support for VoiceXML, which could be the technology Wikipedia plans to use for the "Spoken" version.
(djwm)