Wapedia was a mobile version of

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

. It was started in August 2004 by Florian Amrhein and shut down on 4 November 2013. It was operated by

Taptu Taptu was a social media and technology company that built platforms, tools and applications that enabled content on touch screen mobile devices, including phones running iOS and Android. Taptu was a privately held company that was founded in C ...

. Wapedia was originally a

Wireless Application Protocol Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is a technical standard for accessing information over a mobile wireless network. A WAP browser is a web browser for mobile devices such as mobile phones that use the protocol. Introduced in 1999, WAP achieve ...

(WAP) site for use on

mobile phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whi ...

s of the very early 2000s. The URL for Wapedia was http://wapedia.mobi/ (which was one of the early examples of a

.mobi The domain name mobi is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. Its name is derived from the adjective ''mobile''. The domain was approved by ICANN on 11 July 2005, and is managed by the mTLD global r ...

website). Over time,

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...

interfaces were added, with the site generating pages optimised for a variety of mobile devices such as smart phones,

Personal digital assistant A personal digital assistant (PDA), also known as a handheld PC, is a variety mobile device which functions as a personal information manager. PDAs have been mostly displaced by the widespread adoption of highly capable smartphones, in part ...

s (PDAs), and tablets. In 2009 dedicated applications for iPhone, Android and

WebOS webOS, also known as LG webOS and previously known as Open webOS, HP webOS and Palm webOS, is a Linux kernel-based multitasking operating system for smart devices such as smart TVs that has also been used as a mobile operating system. Initially ...

were launched. Wapedia served articles using a combination of a

proxy Proxy may refer to: * Proxy or agent (law), a substitute authorized to act for another entity or a document which authorizes the agent so to act * Proxy (climate), a measured variable used to infer the value of a variable of interest in climate ...

-like behavior and a local article database. It did not offer the ability to edit pages. Wapedia injected adverts into the Wikipedia articles, either in the HTML or in the applications.

References

External links

* {{Wikipedia Android (operating system) software Discontinued iOS software Websites which mirror Wikipedia 2004 software Computer-related introductions in 2004

See also

References

External links