Wikimedia Mobile Now Offering Opt-In Beta Features
From the Wikimedia Blog:
The Wikimedia mobile project has reached a really exciting point. When we launched our mobile extension last month, we were replacing a really complicated and critical piece of the mobile infrastructure with a much simpler system. I’m happy to say that it’s worked out so well that we’re taking off the beta logo for the production Wikipedia mobile site.
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Since we had a lot of users who really enjoyed being part of the mobile testing community, we’ve retained the beta concept for new, pre-release features. All you have to do going forward is opt-in to the beta program.
By setting this option, you’ll have the ability to test out new features on our mobile site before anyone else. This is great if you want to help steer our mobile projects and don’t mind a little instability here and there. We’ll keep track of how many users opt in and out and individual feature usage so that we can know what’s worth keeping.
If you’re ready to continue as a tester then join the beta and send us feedback. We have two new features available for testers:
- Search suggestions
- Typing on mobile devices can be a pain so were showing you search results as fast as we can
- Huge thanks to Ross Bender for doing the initial work on this
- Interwiki links
- Now any of our multi lingual speakers can just tap the W to switch languages
- This was our most requested feature after launch
Screen Caps and More in the Full Blog Post
See Also: Background About Wikimedia Mobile Projects
Filed under: News, Patrons and Users
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.