This is the new mobile project brought to you by the fine folks at Wikimedia.

The goal of the project is to give access to Wikipedia to all sorts of different mobile devices in all sorts of different languages.

The basic principal is to modify the Wikipedia pages in such a way that they are well suited to a large number of devices.

Initially, XHTML/WebKit phones are the primary target. However, work has already begun on WML devices.

Currently Supported devices:

• iPhone

• Android

Other targeted devices:

• Blackberry (various versions)

• Symbian

• Windows Mobile

This is an open source project and we need lots of help, so go down a bit further to get things running.

1) Install Ruby 1.8 and RubyGems www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/

2) Install the Merb stack. wiki.merbivore.com/howto/installation/gems

3) Setup host headers for en.m.wikitest.org, *.m.wikitest.org for any language that you want to test. Honestly, anything works, but it needs to start with a language code. Point each one at 127.0.0.1 assuming you don’t have some sort of freaky setup. For instance…

127.0.0.1	en.m.wikitest.org
127.0.0.1	ja.m.wikitest.org
127.0.0.1	de.m.wikitest.org
127.0.0.1	fr.m.wikitest.org
127.0.0.1	pl.m.wikitest.org
127.0.0.1	es.m.wikitest.org

4) Install Git git-scm.com/download

5) Checkout the project with the command…

git clone git://github.com/hcatlin/wikimedia-mobile.git

6) Go into the new folder and type

merb

7) Browse to en.m.wikitest.org:4000

8) Start hacking!

Just run this command…

rake todo:list

And you should get a nice list of things that are needed

In the config/init.rb file, we load up all of the language settings from a file in config/wikipedias.yaml since really each language is a different Wikipedia install. Let’s look at an example entry. (May be very out of date!)

en:                                               #Language code
  main_page: "Main_Page"                          #URL to find the main page at on the wiki server
  translations:                                   # List of translations and their keys
    go: "Go"
    search_results: "Search Results"
    no_article_found: "No Article Found"
    featured_article: "Today's Featured Article"
    in_the_news: "In The News"
    random_article: "Random Article"
    copyright: "All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.\n Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a U.S. registered 501(c)(3) tax-deductible nonprofit charity."
  selectors:                                      # CSS3 selectors used to find things on the main pages
    article_of_the_day: "#mp-tfa"
    news_items: "#mp-itn"

• Wikimedia language settings en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=sitematrix

Well, because I’m lazy and I hate versioning this kind of thing… check out Ohloh to find out who has worked on this project the most! www.ohloh.net/p/wikimedia-mobile/contributors

But seriously, this thing wouldn’t be possible at all if it weren’t for all of the amazing developers out there who have spent their free time making Wikimedia Mobile totally freaking awesome.