[Foundation-l] wap.fluffypeople.com/wiki is gone

Thu Jan 18 21:01:19 UTC 2007

Isn't there something called Wapipedia to search WP? I'm pretty sure
I've seen a link to it from my network's content pages.

Personally, I don't see the need for it. I use Opera Mini on my phone
to browse WP and occasionally edit.

The 3G phones can all surely run Opera or even simply the phone's
native browser - Symbian-based, some of them.

On 1/18/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> [sent to foundation-l and wikitech-l]
>
> wap.fluffypeople.com/wiki , a third-party WAP translator for
> Wikipedia, is gone and not coming back.
>
> How did I find this out? A "problem manager" for Hutchison 3G just
> called me! 'Cos the volunteer press contact is obviously the person to
> call about this sort of thing.
>
> Apparently, Hutchison promote Wikipedia as one of the things you can
> get through their service. And apparently they were just hooking into
> this third-party volunteer service. If you go to
> http://wap.fluffypeople.com/wiki/ and read the WML file, the text it
> gives is:
>
> "Sorry folks, the interface to wikipedia is down for the forseeable
> future. There's a bug that crashes the webserver, and I don't have
> free wap access any more, so I've got no incentive to fix it. I hope
> you have enjoyed using the service."
>
> Apparently a Hutchison director saw that message and didn't understand
> that it wasn't us. And this guy read that message and didn't twig that
> it wasn't us. Ahem.
>
> As it happened I knew the right answer - "that'll be a third party
> translator, we don't supply a WAP version of Wikipedia, just the web
> version. If you want to run a WAP service, then you should contact
> fluffypeople and pay them to run the service for you, or you should
> get your own sysadmins to run the service for you."
>
> ANYWAY - it occurred to me that if we want to make Wikimedia projects
> available to people - should we run our own WAP server? Or supply a
> suitable feed or software as a paid feed for phone companies who want
> to sell this to their customers? Or get them to give us the access to
> supply knowledge to the world this way?
>
> (Given our fundraiser shortfall, options that involve money coming to
> WMF are probably the nicest.)
>
> Does any of this sound at all feasible? Not that I'm volunteering for
> the project ... just floating the idea.
>
>
> - d.
>
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-- 
Gary Kirk