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Wapedia

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Photo of http://wapedia.mobi front page as displayed on a Nokia cellphone

Wapedia was a mobile version of Wikipedia. It was started in August 2004 by Florian Amrhein and shut down on 4 November 2013. It was operated by Taptu.[1]

Wapedia was originally a Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) site for use on mobile phones of the very early 2000s. The URL for Wapedia was http://wapedia.mobi (which was one of the early examples of a .mobi website).[2]

Over time HTML interfaces were added with the site generating pages optimised for a variety of mobile devices such as smart phones, PDAs, and tablets.

In 2009 dedicated applications for iPhone/iPad/iPod,[3] Android and WebOS were launched.

Wapedia offers the most recent version of every article, which is done by using a combination of a proxy-like behavior and a local article database. This combination provides both high speed and up-to-date articles and low load and traffic for the Wikipedia servers. The copying of data is one way, from Wikipedia to Wapedia, and so Wapedia does not offer the ability to edit pages. Edits must be made to the original page on the Wikipedia site, which propagate through to Wapedia over time. For many Wapedia users on low-powered mobile devices, this is not an issue since their devices are unsuited to editing significant quantities of text.

Standard Wikipedia pages are typically too long for display on these devices, so long pages are divided into smaller chunks to fit into the small displays and the standard side navigation is removed. To reduce the bandwidth requirements, images are scaled down to the resolution of the mobile device. In addition, Wapedia includes a search engine that is independent from Wikipedia servers. Wapedia supports WML and modern XHTML Mobile formats, with an autodetection of the best format for each device. Articles are served from an independent article database.

Unlike many other mobile Wikipedia solutions, Wapedia injects adverts into the Wikipedia articles, either in the HTML or in the applications.

  • Wapedia running on a BlackBerry 9300 device
    Wapedia running on a BlackBerry 9300 device

See also

References

  1. ^ "About Wapedia". Wapedia. Retrieved 2009-05-12.
  2. ^ "Organizations Launch .mobi Web Sites". DomainNameWire.com. Retrieved 2007-10-12.
  3. ^ "Wapedia". appSafari.com iPhone application gallery. Retrieved 2007-10-12.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Wapedia.
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