Wapedia.mobi is Rocking!

Wapedia is a WAP site created by Florian Amrhein and operated by Taptu that brings the contents of Wikipedia to mobile devices like mobile phones and PDAs.

It offers the most recent version of every article, which is done by using a combination of a proxy-like behavior and a local article database.

This combination provides fast speed and up-to-date articles on the one hand, and a low load and low traffic for the Wikipedia servers on the other hand.

Wapedia was started in August 2004.

Interestingly Wapedia.org now redirects to Wapedia.mobi

Wapedia.mobi is the stand alone site.

The .com equivalent is owned by Frank Schilling, and of course a parked page. So the rapid rise of this .mobi website is indeed exciting and entirely on merit.

The Alexa Traffic Report makes for very interesting reading. A page rank 7 site with a alexa ranking of 12,601 & climbing.

Standard Wikipedia pages are typically too long for display on these devices so long pages are divided into smaller chunks to fit into the small displays.

To reduce the bandwidth requirements, images are scaled down to the resolution of the mobile device. In addition Wapedia includes a fast search engine, independent from Wikipedia servers.

Wapedia supports WML and modern XHTML Mobile formats, with an autodetection of the best format for each device. Articles are served from an independent article database.

The credit for much of the above content goes to Wikipedia.org where they explain all about Wapedia. Please visit their site too for more, as it is often updated.
Of course with any .mobi you are guaranteed a great viewing experience while out and about, it’s why .mobi is becoming so popular. Of course you get a great viewing experience on your pc too when viewing the site.

June 2008 Update:

Alexa rank now of 9,660! & climbing