Mobile Web Influences Every Walk of Life : Now Access Wikipedia Any Time You Want

The mobile web seems to be taking everybody by storm. There was a time when the ability of accessing wap sites on the phones was just a novelty. The real serious candidates would always end up with a BlackBerry. However, with more bandwidth and technologies like 3.5G making a headway in mainstream market, no one can hush away the importance of mobile web any more.

It all started by web sites like Times of India, GMail, Orkut and Facebook launching mobile versions of their main sites, enabling its users easy access on the go. Then came in Twitter and changed the very definition of staying connected with the world.

Following the trends, it’s now time for Wikipedia to launch a mobile version of largest user-created encyclopaedia in the world. Yes, now it doesn’t matter where you are, what kind of data plans your are on and which handset you use, if you have web enabled on your phone, you are just a few kilobytes away from a world of information.

Looking at the homepage of Wikipedia’s mobile version, it is very imminent that it has been designed to keep it as less data hogging as possible. The only image that is visible in the whole site is Wiki logo, that gets loaded only once if you keep your cache switched on.

Once you start wondering around the new homepage, you shall notice it looks very simplistic, has a search feature and links towards the settings and about pages. In the setting page, you can choose the language of your choice, as picture to the right.

When you search for something you are researching about, it just throws you a set of literature to help you with. Although I tried searching for a lot of queries, It didn’t come up with a single picture. As far as the information is concerned, it’s the same as that appears on their web version, without the bells and whistles.

WAT’s Verdict :

• The whole web site is as vanilla as any traditional wap site would be. However, given the fact that today even mobile web is capable of exchanging data at the rate of 20-30 kbps. Moreover, with dedicated internet surfing devices like the N 801 and iPhone, it would have been great if Wiki, at least, had the option of enabling loading of images. More choice given to users, more people embrace a product.
• The very idea of a wiki is the ability for people to edit the content the way they see it right. Unless wikipedia plans to turn the web site into a full fledged traditional encyclopaedic site, content editing controls would have been very nice to have.
• It is very important to colorize the level of authenticity of a piece of information. It is imperative that wikipedia embraces that soon.