Wikipedia talk:WAP access

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I get a page which is titled Wikipedia.org and says "Google proxy". I fill in GSM to the text field. I choose go. I get "No gateway reply" 3 times out of four.. One time out of four it works. Oh well..

It looks neat, but the donations bit, which isn't a problem normally, takes up the first whole page. It would be better as a single link from the word "donate". Probably not easy to fix though.. Mozzerati 20:55, 2004 Aug 5 (UTC)

The donations bit wasn't there when I wrote it originally – I just enjoyed being able to look things up while away from home and no-one else seems to have bothered with Wikipedia/WAP. I have the same reliability issues but these are typical of WAP, I have found. Articles are broken up (by the Google proxy) because not all mobiles can handle large pages. What is really needed is for someone to create a script that dynamically fetches the articles, gets the relevant text and then presents it properly. A good example is the http://www.fizzl.net/projects/sdwap.php (HTML) / http://slashdot.fizzl.net (WAP) server for Slashdot headlines. I could do something on my PC, but it's not switched on all the time so it's no use to anyone. As soon as someone creates a replacement, they are welcome to update this article for us.  – Lee J Haywood 18:50, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I have tried to use it on my phone, but the google proxy just isnt great enough. What we need is a css file for mobes so it's easier to use wikipedia like that. --TIB (talk) 01:42, Aug 21, 2004 (UTC)

Not being happy with the google based wap interface, I have written my own (WML access only)(New link below Osric 10:16, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)). Its a bit rough at the moment, and users can't edit. (should this be fixed?) Currently hosted on my DSL line, I'll move it somewhere better connected once a few people have tested it. It works ok with my Nokia 5100, but since its the only phone I've got access to I'd like feedback....Moose Morals

I've tried one page with my 'phone (a Sendo M550) and found two minor problems. If you retrieve Shiri_Appleby there is an ampersand as part of the M&M's URL. This should be escaped as & rather than being an ambiguous & (as reported by validator.w3.org). One other problem shared by both our interfaces is that when you hit 'Go' it should generate a URL such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=shiri+appleby&go=Go which, in spite of the lower case letter in the second search word, brings back the correct page. Our interfaces fail because they just try to get the article directly by name. It would be a big improvement if the search box appeared near the top – my display is small and it takes a lot of effort to scroll down. I think that editing would be dangerous, firstly because some pages are too big for most people to handle and, more importantly, because people insist on using non-ASCII characters (they assume that everyone uses the ISO 8859-1 extended character set) rather than HTML entities.  – Thanks, Lee J Haywood 15:52, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for the feedback, I've been working on the gatway to cover the points you made, and to fix some other things too. The gateway will now try the search page if Special:Export doesn't give any text back, and I've massivly improved the entity handling, both inside and outside of URLS's. I've had ago at re-writing the start page, but since interfacing with humans isn't one of my strong points any suggestions for the format for that page are welcome.
I'm planning on adding support for tables, and other HTML tags (including <nowiki>), and for #redirect links when I have time over the next few days. Moose Morals 19:07, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I've done a little more testing and have a few more points for you to look at, if you find the time...
  • One of the features of my page is that it has been kept as small as possible, both for speed and for those that have to pay for the data that they transfer. It would be nice if you put the instructions in the article (when you're ready to do so, of course) and removed as many words as possible from the search page.
  • There really needs to be an auto-redirect on the gateway. It's a waste of the user's time and money having to click the link, e.g. from Frozen food to Freezing (food) (luckily my access is free for now).
  • Links that have letters outside the square brackets aren't being underlined in the same way as with HTML, e.g. [[bacteria]]l appears as bacterial.
  • With my 'phone, the -18 °C on the Freezing (food) page was appearing as -18°C but is now showing as the raw Wiki code instead.
  • The language links are appearing – it would be better if they were hidden completely.
  • Looking at the XML source, some whitespace removal would help to reduce the page size, as would getting rid of the leading zeros in entity values.
Thanks.  — Lee J Haywood 20:01, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Thanks Lee, and keep it up!
  • (Smaller first page) I'm not sure about this point. Feel free to put up some examples of how you would like the front page/search page to look, but I think that there is a need for some basic instructions on the search page. I could put instructions on one page and then have a very stripped search box on a second page, so that I would advertise the front page and people could bookmark the second. (Personaly, I don't like this suggestion, but I don't have any others right now)
  • (Auto-redirect) Fixed.
  • (Links with letters) Fixed. (I think. So, as always, let me know if you see a counter-example)
  • (Entity handling/-18 °C) Not Fixed. I'm having some problems with entiity handling. Its improved (I think) since when your comments were posted, but I'm still not happy. I'll be working on that this week. (I've been having a short break from the real world, but I'm back to my normal 5 day week now)
  • (Language links) Um. Open to discussion. Hiding them is not technically dificult, but I am planning on adding support for the other language wikipedias at some point. (I guess the short term solution is just to hide them)
  • (Tighter XML) Fixed-ish. Leading zeros are gone, entities are now hex encoded for the help that that gives. I'm not sure where I could remove whitespace from, unless you'd like the whole document on a single line (and I don't want the whole document on a single line)
  • Any other suggestions?
Osric 09:26, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC) (no longer hiding behind my sig)
  • If you don't like my method (instructions on Wikipedia, just a search box on the WML page) then let me suggest that you write an instructions page, but just have it as a 'help' link from the search page. Also, please consider the Google search page – it's just a search box with links to settings, help, etc. There's no need to say anything really, with the possible exception of mentioning the IP logging. What more does it really need other than a title, search box and a 'Go' button?
  • As far as language links go, my only problem is that they usually use non-ASCII (i.e. 8-bit or Unicode) characters that probably won't display properly. I suppose I just don't want to see them at the top of an article, but some pages do have them there.
  • I only mentioned whitespace because the one article I looked at had some – but not much. As for single lines, I might mention that my 'phone seems to have a bug where it ignores the new-lines between lines in a paragraph. So on your page, for example, "to start" becomes "tostart" and "the phrase" shows as "thephrase", etc. Of course if everything was on one line the 'phone would probably just crash instead... I'd just leave it as it is.
  • Apart from being able to filter out the body of the article from the larger page, the main ideas I had for a dynamic gateway were to allow searches (basically just translating the existing HTML search results) and to allow settings. Since we probably all use a bookmark to access your interface, it wouldn't be too hard to make part of the URL contain some form of settings. So perhaps there could be a setting to hide other languages, non-ASCII characters, etc. Also, how about a configurable page size so that you can have fewer 'Next' links but ensure that the pages aren't too big for a particular mobile device?
Unless you plan to make some big changes, I think that you're ready to link to your page from the article, either now or as soon as you think that it is stable enough.
Thanks.  — Lee J Haywood 22:06, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I'm just waiting now for approval from Talk:Bots, and then I'll put the good host up on the page. Osric 23:38, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Well, no strong objections from Talk:Bots, and I've actually fixed the entity problems (this time I'm sure! :-), I'm just not sure how to put the link into the article. The link above is now just for testing and development, the live version (WML browsers only) is up and running. Osric 10:16, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)
The test version now searches google (with a site:en.wikipedia.org filter) via the google api if the article is not found (so that means there is a hard 1000 search/day limit). I've also shortened the front page by linking to the instructions and copyright. I'm going to be uploading to the stable server at the weekend, unless anyone can find serious bugs.
Things to do, in no particular order.
  • Table support (I think this one will be tricky)
  • Emphasis handling (I thought I had this cracked, but my regular expressions were to simple)
  • Multi-language support (Should be easy enough, but I only speak en, so I'll probably need help testing.)
  • Per user settings (specifically page size)
  • Since most articles are split into several pages (and that will get worse with smaller pages), I've been thinking about an index/toc page with just the headers and links to the appropriate sub-page.
  • Links to the talk page for the article. (This will end up on the index page if I do those).
  • Anything I've missed?
(By the way, nice re-write Lee!)
Osric 10:19, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • Hurrah for implementing the Google search. It's hard to think of something that isn't the name of an article but appears within one, though I had already searched for "Xft" on my PC earlier. The results coming back from the Google API are quite different from Wikipedia's own search results. On my mobile I had no idea why Xhosa appeared until I went to the PC and found /xft/ in a URL.
  • Also, your search results page said "Nothing found for ." – seems to be missing the search term.
  • I don't think I'll be able to appreciate tables – my display is too small [1].
  • %s/gatway/gateway/g
— Lee J Haywood 12:31, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)


Thank you, Osric, for your excellent work. I redirected the wp.alf.nu address to your superior gateway; I hope you don't mind. erlingalf (now registered :-)

I've updaed the stable version, mostly better image link and template hiding, and added some info to my user page about the gateway, and my plans for it.Osric 22:34, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

OK, so I'm getting problems with some pages (for example, Ted Hughes) due to weird quote characters. Is it my phone, or the gateway mishandling unicode? (online and offline xml validators say that the wml is fine...) Osric 23:19, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Those are 'Microsoft quotes'. When someone uses a Microsoft package, it automatically replaces both single and double quotes to look like they open and close – '6'/'9' and '66'/'99'. Rather annoyingly, they are preserved even when saving and the 'text only' format is chosen. If you look at ISO 8859-1 that particular character isn't present (0x92 for '9'-style), but scroll down to Windows-1252 and there it is. You should just translate them to plain ASCII. I have a web server that does the same thing, which also does dashes, etc. – I'll try to look at the code during the week.  — Lee J Haywood 08:34, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Hmm. I've put a simple fix in to change 0x91 and 0x92 to single quote, 0x93 and 0x94 to double qoutes, and to just flatten anything else between 0x7F and 0x9F to a question mark, but my phone is still not happy. Any other suggestions? Osric 13:55, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I managed to deduce that your mobile refuses to display the page entirely, and mine has the same problem. I did a binary search of your WML and found that the '$' symbol in '$5000' is causing the problem. You just need to replace each occurrence with two of them, e.g. '$$5000'.  — Lee J Haywood 17:43, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
OK, my bad, I should have read the spec properly (or at all...:-). Fixed. Thanks for tracking that down!
Now that I've found a copy of the spec, I'll put some time into reading it and checking for anything else obvious, but todays fixes have removed all the pages from my list of 'broken , to investigate why.' Time to spend more time looking for trouble.... Osric 18:32, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Of course Microsoft reads standards. Otherwise they would be in danger of accidentally complying with them. — JIP | Talk 14:06, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Going back the MS characters, my web server also translates 133 (0x85) from an ellipsis into 3 dots and 150 (0x96) into a dash – things that people actually pasted into it from e-mails. I suppose 151 (0x97) probably should be turned into a dash as well.   — Lee J Haywood 19:49, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I'm working on a windows-1252 => unicode translation table, see my user page for the current set. My phone doesn't have the glyphs for some, marked with 'Nope' on the list. I'd like to encorage anyone who's interested to look at the list (with a phone for prefernce) and let me know what doesn't work, and other suggestions for mapping MS to unicode.
This is something that I think the server should be handling long term, probably when a new edit is presented in any non-unicode character set, but after messing around with character sets for a while, I begin to understand the difficulties involved.. Osric 23:55, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • My mobile doesn't handle the current translations of &mdash; and &ndash; – they just appear as a box. Please dump them as plain ASCII dashes instead.
  • I had trouble remembering where I'd seen this problem, which prompts me to ask if you might be willing to create a HTML page that shows which pages have been visited recently (e.g. the last 7 days). The idea is that if someone sees an article that they'd like to edit, they could check the HTML page to remind them which one it was – a day or two later when they return to their PC. Showing the IP address and/or 'phone type (from the User-Agent header) would help, and it would be nice to see what other people are using your interface for.
  • Are you collecting any usage statistics?
— Lee J Haywood 09:11, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • I don't think the first two features belong in this gateway. (I would have said they are more browser problems) However, it shouldn't be two hard to write a proxy to rewrite WML pages on the fly, which could also add extra cookies to track users and pages, and generate usage reports.
  • I'm collecting apache logs, and some internal stats from the gateway. Headline figures from analog, (for the last 7 days to Sun 3 April 2005) are 397 requests from 37 distinct hosts, for a total of 846kb traffic sent out. The internal stats are harder to interpet, but show usage is very bursty - 20 articles are accessed over half an hour, and then nothing for six hours. I'm second highest user by both requests and bytes, (although I tend to use the test server instead). My gatway has recieved 104 requests forwarded from wp.alf.nu (since the start of the log in Feb 2005).
  • I don't want to make much more detail than that public, due to the UK's Data Protection Act
  • Osric 09:01, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I've updated the code for the gateway to add infrastructure for per user options, so that people can pick how long they want their own pages. I've been testing it with my phone, and it works for me. Please have a go on the testing server (WAP browsers only please) before I update the fast site. Osric 06:49, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Well, no-one reported any bugs, and It Works For Me (tm), so I've updated the code on the fast site (http://wap.fluffypeople.com/wiki, and remember its WML browsers only please). As always, let me know about problems (or if you think its fantastic!).Osric 8 July 2005 09:52 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Wapedia

i moved wikipedia.7val.com to the top again as it provides the most features and is very close to the functionality of wikipedia.org itself so the user should notice this first.--Trigan777 20:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't think that this is fair. 1. my wapedia was the first service, that provides mobile access to the wikipedia. I am working for 1,5 years on this project. 2. I provide the same features. The only difference is, that I don't provide an editor for articles. But I have good reasons for this: I don't want, that bad people use my site as an anonymizing proxy to damagage articles in wikipedia. 3. My site has some advantages over 7val.com: It is faster, it is indipendend of the speed of the wikipedia-servers. --212.202.33.97 21:07, 27 January 2006 (UTC) (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Florian.A)
i respect the work you put in wapedia, but - (1) fairness in this context means fairness to the wikipedia users. A wikipedian should get the best possible information first - regardless of the authors history. (2) i see a lot more differences : wikipedia.7val.com supports usermanagement, editing incl. watches, all languages, all MNO formats, all sister projects and last but not least - its information is up to date. http://www.openproxies.com/ seems to be better resource for a dos attack than a mobilizing software that sends x-forwarded-for headers! (3) Good Point. In one of the next versions of wikipedia.7val.com a fallback based on the database backup in case of slow wikipedia servers will be used. Until that we care about wikipedia itself by integrating wikipedia.7val.com in major MNO-Portals resulting in annual donations to the wikimedia foundation.--Trigan777 22:19, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Withdrawl of wap.fluffypeople.com

Hi folks. I wrote the wap.fluffypeople.com interface at a time when I had free internet access via my phone, and the alternative was just Googles interface. Now that I have to pay for access, and now that there are far better alternatives, I am going to slowly withdraw the service. The first stage (which I have done today) is to remove the links from here. Sooner or later, I'll put a link to 7val.com on my wap site, and then eventually close the page down altogether. I never intended my service as a permanant solution, and now that there is a project that seems to be run very close to wikipedia there is less need for an independent service. I would like to thank all the people who gave feedback on the service, who helped to make it better (or at least work!). I'll continue to monitor this page for a few more weeks, then my interest in this project will be done. Osric 07:46, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

  • NO!!! - Please don't! Yours is a great interface! --Anthony Ivanoff 14:20, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
I'll explain why your solution is the best. 1) It breaks pages into small chunks 2) It has minumum of unnecessary bullshit like "Copyrights", "Random page" and other stuff which consumes traffic. 3) It doesn't change the background of the page. 4) It doesn't give out pages which cannot be viewed at my SonyEricsson T290i, that is, too large pages. 5) Other things I forgot. Thanks for your great work and please don't give it up!!! --Anthony Ivanoff 10:53, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
Try out http://en.wapedia.org/wapedia:light - I reduced the size of the startpage in this version. If you have problems with it on your T290i, please mail me. I am sure, I can fix the problem. --Florian.A 12:19, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Hi folks. For some reason, from about two evenings ago, I've been getting random server crashes that seem to go away when I turn of the wikipedia gateway. So I've turned it off permanantly. Sorry folks, but since there are alternatives, and I don't have free wap access any more, I've got no incentive to fix it. I hope those of you who have used the interface have got what you wanted out of it (lots of porn if the logs are to be believed). Thanks especialy to Lee J Haywood for help getting the service working in the first place, and to whoever gave the link to three mobile that has got me more than 4k hits/day.Osric 16:07, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Problems with wiki.wml

I have moved the hosting of the WML page, since my existing ISP has corrupted the webpages of their entire customer base and I've just signed-up with another (so the old www.deth.dsl.pipex.com page will eventually disappear). Unfortunately, the new host (and the old one, now that they've broken it) doesn't understand the '.wml' extension and serves it with a content type of application/octet-stream rather than text/vnd.wap.wml. I tried uploading it to Wikipedia itself, but just get ".wml is not a recommended image file format". Can anyone help to give it a stable home with the correct content type? Thanks.   — Lee J Haywood 12:04, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Chess diagram images

For what it's worth, http://mobile.answers.com is the only mobile site I have found that gets chess diagrams right. They are tables consisting of 64 small gifs (one for each square on the chessboard). wapedia doesn't show them at all and 7val gets them sort-of right but not completely. See Queen's Gambit Declined, then try the equivalent page in your mobile device.

this is a general problem: Wikipedia often uses tables for layout, that can't be displayed on mobile phones. So I have to decide: remove all tables, and try to display the cells among each other, hoping that it will be OK in the most cases. Or to simply display the tables, hoping that modern phones know what to do with them (horizontal scrolling, or also removing the table structure). I am writing a new parser for wapedia, that will be finished end of this year. There I will try to autodetect the table-capabilities of mobile devices, or add a switch to the preferences menu, where you can enable or disable tables. Maybe this will help. --Florian.A 09:42, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
Yeah mobile.answers.com has done a good job for some time now. Mathiastck 00:25, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] I have a question

Question:
When I go on Wikipedia on my Treo 650, It links to

www.wikipeida.com

and not

wap.wikipedia.com

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Hiddenhearts (talk • contribs) 20:33, 9 March 2007 (UTC).

You didn't actually ask a question, but I assume you're talking about a default setting and (I'm guessing, from the relevant Wikipedia articles) you will be using Blazer (web browser) which is a fully-featured web browser. Because the Treo is a smartphone you presumably don't need to use WAP (which is useless) and can instead use full HTTP/HTML. — Lee J Haywood 21:11, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
Ok thank you. Hiddenhearts Sign Here! My Talk 23:25, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
My blackberry loads the regular website just fine, but I find the WAP side seems to load much faster. ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 19:48, 2 July 2007 (UTC)
Although Blazer can display HTML pages, the WAP wikipedia site is optimized for mobile use, which means that besides presenting a much smaller data transfer, omits the many distracting links on the default wikipedia skin in respect of a mobile device's limited screen real estate. Vectro 15:02, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bug in WAP access

If anyone knows how to contact the developers in charge of maintaining the wap feature, please let me know.

The problem I'm having is that I'm unable to access the article Pirsig's metaphysics of quality via WAP; I presume the issue is a quoting problem related to the apostrophe in the page title. Instead of the page text, I get a page that reads:

Found articles for: Pirsig\'s metaphysics of quality
Pirsig's_metaphysics_of_quality
Robert_M._Pirsig
Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance

et cetera.

This is on a Treo 600 with Blazer 3.0. Anyone with questions, reply here on on my talk page. Vectro 15:00, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] 7val

7val appears to be blocked as an open proxy - can anyone confirm whether it is still possible to log in (without getting autoblocked) and edit? I don't know how to read the block log to see what kind of block it is —Random832 20:30, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Opera mini editing for logged-in users?

I know Opera mini works through an open proxy, but where can I see (or start) a discussion of whether Opera mini should be unblocked for registered users? I would love to use my phone to edit Wikipedia when I'm not at a fixed internet link, but the built-in browser is too lame for words. --Slashme (talk) 14:08, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Short URL to en.wap.wikipedia.org

wap.enwp.org will redirect you to en.wap.wikipedia.org. This is a unofficial feature. Read more Tl-lomas (talk) 15:24, 15 February 2008 (UTC)