[Foundation-l] Access Wikipedia through SMS

Thu Jun 30 09:50:31 UTC 2005

david at bruehlmeier.com (david at bruehlmeier.com) [050628 19:19]:

> This is how we figured it might work: Send an SMS with the keyword (the term you
> want to look up) to a special number. The server will then access Wikipedia and
> return the abstract of the article. You will only get as much as will fit into
> an SMS, but in many cases, this will be enough.

This idea has been thrown around for a while :-) You can be sure someone
will implement it eventually. Probably using, as you say, the first 160
chrs of the article.

Perhaps this will lead to better-formed [[:en:Wikipedia:Lead summary]]
sections ;-)

I understand there has also been discussion about this for Africa - where
cellphones are much more common than Internet connections. And how to make
editing via cellphone usable, since we're not a read-only encyclopedia.

(Hmm, what would the GFDL have to say about this?)

- d.