Official Wikipedia app released for iPhone

AppleInsider

The official Wikipedia application from the Wikimedia Foundation was released for the iPhone and iPod touch this week. Though there are many competing applications that access Wikipedia's extensive database, this is the first official offering.



"This app is focused on being very simple and very fast," the official description reads. "Over time, we'll add features based on requests."



Wikipedia Mobile is a free 1.6MB download that is open source and community built. The Wikimedia Foundation has asked for volunteers with expertise in JavaScript and HTML5 to assist. The application requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later.

nagromme

It mat be great one day, but right now the app is slow to start up, has a messed-up UI (tiny text in the search field, extra buttons that do nothing when searching, visual glitches) and doesn't facilitate using non-Wikipedia sites at the same time (which is typical when looking something up online).



Luckily, Wikipedia provides a great alternative that starts up faster and works great: the Wikipedia site itself is now iPhone-optimized. Bookmark it to your home screen and will get a real icon and everything. That's what I'd use for now instead of any app.

nagromme

I used to use and like Wikipanion, but search had real problems. It would fail to find some things even when they WERE on Wikipedia. That happened to me pretty often. I stopped using it so I don't know if that's still the case.



WikiTap had some issues too--reliance on a cached copy instead of "live" Wikipedia by default meant you got shorter, incomplete articles. (But I assume it would work without the Internet, which could be handy.)



So I keep coming back to Wikipedia's iPhone optimized site. It does the job well.

ireland

Looks terrible. By far the best Wikipedia app for the iPhone is QUICKPEDIA.