Task force/Offline/Cellphone

Targeting cellphones for WP 1.0

Given the penetration of cellphones in the developing world, the Offline Talkforce considers the cellphone platform to be a priority. It was agreed that whatever format the WP 1.0 release is in, it should be convertible to an HTML dump.

There is already a supplier for wikipedia on cellphones - http://www.wikipock.com/ . The Wikipock collection is 7 GB, which includes all the English WP, as well as ES and PT But no pictures or infoboxes.

Issues

storage capacity
- Modern phones in 2009 have micro-SD slots - that (to date) have capacities up to 32 Gig
- We are targeting phones in 2011 or so
- The phone itself has more limited storage - sizes of 16Meg to 64Meg would be useful to target
- Content might be selective - full articles, lede only, pictures or not, references or not
presentation
1. A reader
  - allows custom storage format, search
  - must be built for each platform - Symbian, Windows Mobile, Android
  - User:Kelson warned that the ZIM file might need to be device-specific
  - User:Aude explores SMS and voice gateways on Talk
2. cellphones built-in browser
  - All targeted phones will have one
  - May require inefficient storage like uncompressed HTML
  - Mozilla Fennec, a mobile-browser project, and embedding APIs may provide a future browser-based reader functionality.

Third world preloading of cellphones

A long discussion by User:Dafer45 on the Talk: page of this article can be summarised as :-

Create an application suitable for mobile phones that can hold a large amount of articles
Compile a list of important an well written material for each country/region/language
Convince mobile phone developers to depending on which country/region/language it distributes its phone to, to preload these phones with a localized version of the application with the material from the corresponding list.

Use of online mobile access

Possible to be a telcom service?