While the Wikipedia is one of the most popular destinations on the Internet, it surprisingly lacked an official mobile version until today. Over the years, a number of companies released their own mobile versions of the service, but an official version the Wikipedia itself was never available through a dedicated mobile interface. Now, you can surf to mobile.wikipedia.com to see a stripped down but highly functional version of the Wikipedia on your favorite mobile device.
Basic, But Functional
The site itself is indeed very basic and has been stripped of all images, which means it works well on a slow connection, but also makes for a somewhat disappointing experience compared to other mobile versions like the Wikipanion iPhone app (iTunes link).
The mobile site also breaks the content of the articles down into separate chunks and puts them onto different pages. This, too, makes browsing faster, but also makes it harder to find information on the service.
Spoken Wikipedia?
Steve Rubel also found a link to a feature called the “Spoken Wikipedia” in the settings, though this functionality is not available yet. We assume that this will allow you to play recorded versions of articles in the future, though we don’t know if this will be achieved through speech synthesis or (crowdsourced?) audio recordings. There are already about 800 spoken articles available on the site.
