Help:Mobile access
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia | This help page is a how-to guide. It details processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms and practices. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. |
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It is possible to access Wikipedia on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones through several different methods.
Official mobile access
Mobile version of the site
Official Mobile English Wikipedia. Users of supported mobile devices are automatically redirected to the official mobile version of Wikipedia.
- Supported: iOS, Android, WebOS, Opera Mini, NetFront (Amazon Kindle, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3), Nintendo Switch, etc.
- Tablets are served a slightly modified version of the mobile site, which makes use of the larger screen size to e.g. show a table of content and display all article sections open by default.
This mobile version is available for all languages of Wikipedia. It is actively developed, supported and translated. It supports editing; visit any article and you'll see a pencil icon on every section. Anyone, including those who are not logged in, can use the mobile editor. You can also check your watchlist on mobile, add/remove articles from it, and more. If you don't want to use the mobile version, you can find options at the bottom of every page to switch to the desktop version.
- Wikipedia mobile website
- Email, Twitter, Mobile-l mailing list, IRC: #wikimedia-mobile connect
- Report a new bug or view the list of known bugs
- The mobile version is based on the MobileFrontend extension of the MediaWiki software, and maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation's Reading Web team.
Browsing options for older phones
WAP-only browsers
Are no longer supported
Legacy mobile browsers
Legacy mobile browsers that were fairly advanced during their time, such as NetFront (2.3), should be able to browse the Wikipedia Mobile version without too much effort. Depending on a phone's capabilities, it may be advisable to turn images and JavaScript off.
Opera Mini
Older featurephones' native browsers commonly have limited functionality and are outdated. If your phone is Java ME-capable, you might consider installing Opera Mini, a Java ME-based Internet browser for mobile phones. Some phones have Opera Mini built-in, and may only require setting the browser up for use. Opera Mini works by sending a request to Opera's servers, which return a compressed and stripped-down page to the phone. Depending on version, Opera Mini is often more functional and up-to-date than the native browser supplied with the phone. Opera Mini has a built-in Wikipedia search facility.
- Opera Mini website — Various versions are on offer to match the capabilities of a particular phone.
Official mobile app
Technical resources: mailing list and bug lists linked above, apps development team page.
iOS
The official iOS application from the Wikimedia Foundation is called "Wikipedia Mobile". It is free, and lets you read and edit articles. It shows links to other language versions and article history, but not watchlist or talk pages.
- Read the iOS Wikipedia app FAQ
Android
The official Android application from the Wikimedia Foundation is called "Wikipedia". It is free, and lets you read and edit articles. It has no article watch feature.
- Read the Android Wikipedia app FAQ
Regular (desktop) site
If a browser is installed for general use, it can be used to access the general Wikipedia site, also for editing, depending on limitations of the browser. One may want to adapt the user style and preferences to optimize them for the mobile device. For example, navigation popups may or may not be convenient on the mobile device.
Mobile website versions
The official mobile version of Wikipedia is located at https://en.m.wikipedia.org.
Over the years, many users and developers had created their own websites for reading Wikipedia on a variety of mobile devices; most of them are now defunct (as of November 2013), with Wapedia having remained until 4 November 2013 as one of the last non-Wikipedia holdouts to serve WAP-formatted textual Wikipedia content for mobile devices.
Pediaphon
A computer-generated audio (speech synthesis) version of all Wikipedia articles is provided by the Pediaphon service. It is usable on- and off-line with common MP3 players, PDAs, cell phones (WAP) and with every phone via voice call. Pediaphon can be used as a location-based service.
Applications
Official apps
These are, of course, free:
iOS apps
Many iOS apps exist for browsing Wikipedia. Besides the mobile version of the site, the only app capable of editing Wikipedia is the official one.
| Name | Price | Can edit? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | Free | Yes | Official Wikipedia iPhone application |
| Wikipanion | Free | No | |
| Wikipanion Plus | $4.99 | No | |
| Minipedia – Offline Wiki | Free | No | Contains the 100.000 most read articles; multilanguage support: English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish |
| MiniWiki | Free | No | Allows browsing Wikipedia on the Apple Watch |
Android apps
- See all "Wikipedia" apps in the Google Play store (formerly known as the Android Market)
- Official Wikipedia Android app
- EveryWiki for Android
- Kiwix Offline viewer
Wiktionary
- Wiktionary
- English Dictionary
- KiwiDict Offline Dictionary
E-readers
Amazon Kindle
Amazon Kindles have access to Wikipedia content on the "experimental browser" included in Kindle software. All content is shown in black-and-white (all colored images and graphs are converted).
EPub encyclopaedias
The Wiki-as-Ebook project provides massive encyclopaedias for E-Book-readers created from a large set of Wikipedia articles (commercial; 2013). Colored images are converted to grayscale.
Source code, direct download and other useful resource links
Team pages:
- https://www.mediawiki.org/wikipedia/Wikimedia_Apps/Team - Home page for app development team
- https://www.mediawiki.org/wikipedia/Wikimedia_mobile_engineering - Home page for mobile engineering team (generally)
Release history
- https://www.mediawiki.org/wikipedia/Mobile/Release_history - release history
Releases
- https://releases.wikimedia.org - general releases site
- Stable releases by operating system:
Source code, developer access, making contributions
- https://github.com/wikimedia/apps-android-wikipedia - github source code mirror (actual code hosted with Gerrit)
- For other platforms replace "android" by iOS, win8 or other platform name, or see below for full list of apps
- https://www.mediawiki.org/wikipedia/How_to_contribute - contributing/developer access
- https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/admin/projects - code review site/list of projects
- https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/admin/projects/?filter=app - list of official apps (including mobile Wikipedia but also others)
Feedback/bugs/issues:
- Email address: mobile-android-wikipedia@wikimedia.org
See also
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Wikipedia on PDAs and mobile phones. |
- mw:Extension:MobileFrontend – extension that defines the interface displayed for mobile devices
- Template:If mobile – template that differentiates content based on whether the viewer is using a mobile device
- Help:Multilingual support for Android
- Wikipedia:Editing on mobile devices (essay)