[Foundation-l] Re: Access Wikipedia through SMS

Thu Jun 30 15:01:25 UTC 2005

david at bruehlmeier.com wrote:
> Dear Wikipedians,

Hoi David,

> 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.

The problem is that all articles start like this:

"Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) ...."

or:

"The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (established 
1958) is ...."

What I mean to say is that the first sentence is alway very long but not 
very informative.

> I wrote this idea to Swisscom Mobile and got the answer that they would actually
> be interested to offer such a service. However, there would have to be a
> standardized gateway by Wikipedia to their Vodaphone live service. Other than
> that, it would not be implemented. The responsible manager made it clear that
> the phone company would not implement such a gateway, but that it would have to
> be done by Wikipedia.

There are companies offering SMS to HTTP gateways. All you would have to 
do is write some PHP or Perl code that would reply to the SMS messages. 
For Switzerland, such SMS would cost around CHF 0.40 to 1.00, and you'd 
get about 20%-30% of that.

A real problem is that these services are normally only available in one 
country, so you'd have to make contracts for all the countries where you 
want to offer the service.

-Stephan