Color me unimpressed, but in this day and age, when you take your site mobile, you keep the same address you use for the desktop version. That’s not what wikipedia did. They launched a new mobile-optimized version of the HUGE free online encyclopedia, which is a bit too late shall we mention, but instead of making the site available on http://www.wikipedia.com, an address that every average Joe will try on his mobile to access it, they brought it to http://mobile.wikipedia.com which will only likely be known by über geeks. What’s worse is that if you hit the full Wikipedia version on your mobile, you aren’t told that there is a mobile optimized version. Ugh. I was ready to forgive this slippery but I was hit with even more letdowns as I went on exploring the new site.
First of all, there is a Settings option which allows you to choose your language. Nothing else. That’s all the “settings” you are allowed to set.
- FAIL 1: I can’t have two languages available on my handset at the same time, which as an English and French speaking person, I usually need.
- FAIL 2: where the hell are the other settings?! Seriously?!
Second, the article rendering is awful. I can’t begin to explain how horrible of an experience this mobile site gives.
- FAIL 3: Each article is divided into pages which show a small snippet of text. Long articles, like for example Biotechnology, span on 31 pages!!! The problem is that you can’t set Wikipedia to show you longer pages, which means that you fave to click next every 1-2 minutes for 30 times to read an article such as this.
- FAIL 4: Images are microscopic. They load as thumbnail-size, you click on them and nothing happens. Good going for an encyclopedia page. You can’t set the image size to be bigger.
- FAIL 5: No tables. Ugh, articles that have tables in them show a blank row. Try seeing the Scorpions discography on your mobile for example! You get nothing.
- FAIL 6: There is a direct link to the contents of each article, which isn’t a half bad idea but the problem is that each part of these contents will load on different pages according to its length, like the full article.
Third, there is an amazingly long list of things this mobile site misses, like:
- FAIL 7: No “search” option, just “Go”. This means that you have to know the exact title of the article you want to read. For example if you’re looking for “Nokia PC Suite” but don’t know how to spell it, you could type “Nokia” on the desktop Wikipedia site and hit Search which would give you a list of articles that are relevant to Nokia, of which Nokia PC Suite. You can’t do that on the mobile site, since if you type Nokia and hit go, you are directly taken to the Nokia article, and can’t get a list of relevant articles for the Nokia keyword.
- FAIL 8: No categories. Big fat fail, since I rely on these a lot when searching for information related to a certain topic.
- FAIL 9: External links open in full web versions, which is a total pain to wait for to load, and to browse.
- FAIL 10: No editing option for the articles.
Thanks Wikipedia for finally releasing a mobile version of your site, but honestly, is this the best you can do?! I’m sticking to Wapedia which I reviewed earlier, and which solves ALL of the issues I mentioned with the mobile version of Wikipedia. Article length, images, tables, languages, lots of settings, Search and Go, categories, Google optimized external links, editing, and a ton more options make Wapedia an amazingly smooth experience and one of my preferred mobile bookmarks.
