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Help:Mobile access

Readers' FAQ and help

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

Mobile Wikipedia on Firefox 67

Official Mobile English Wikipedia. Users of supported mobile devices are automatically redirected to the official mobile version of Wikipedia.

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.

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.

Wikipedia mobile on Opera Mini 5.
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 application

Main article: Wikipedia App

Technical resources: mailing list and bug lists linked above, apps development team page.

iOS

Shortcut
"WP:IPHONE" redirects here. For the WikiProject taskforce, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Apple Inc./iOS task force.

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.

Android

Shortcut
The mobile app version of the English Wikipedia's main page.

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.

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

Further information: List of Wikipedia mobile 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

Android apps

Wiktionary

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:

Release history

Releases

Stable releases by operating system:

Source code, developer access, making contributions

For other platforms replace "android" by iOS, win8 or other platform name, or see below for full list of apps

Feedback/bugs/issues:

  • Email address: mobile-android-wikipedia@wikimedia.org

See also

References