The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia, is piloting a service that provides access to Wikipedia articles on basic mobile phones. Wikipedia Zero will launch in Kenya for a three-month pilot to work out bugs before bring the service to other parts of the world.
Users who want to access articles from Wikipedia Zero will have to dial *515# and wait for a text message asking what they would like to search. After sending a query, users will get another text back to clarify which article they would like to read. Then the user will be asked which section they would like to read before all the relevant text is sent to their phone. It’ll be interesting to see how Wikipedia Zero handles long blocks of text since SMS is limited to 160 characters per message.
While it sounds cumbersome to those of us with smartphones, Wikipedia Zero could bring knowledge to those who do not have access or cannot afford connecting to the internet.
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[Source: The Next Web]
