The Wikimedia Foundation announced today that it has finally added the ability to edit Wikipedia from mobile devices. Historically, you’ve only been able to do so from the desktop.
This is an increasingly important feature, as over 15% of Wikipedia’s users are already accessing the site on mobile devices. This number will obviously continue to trend upwards.
The feature is starting out in trial mode, available only to those with Wikimedia accounts. If this applies to you, you can look for the pencil icon to access the edit feature. If not, you can easily sign up for an account.
Wikimedia’s Juliusz Gonera writes in a blog post, “For our first release, our primary goal was to create a fast, intuitive editing experience for new users and experienced editors alike, while still sticking with markup editing for now. We started simple so we could observe our users’ needs and expectations.”
“We’ve already seen an encouraging number of users try out editing on our experimental beta site, where we first built the feature,” Gonera adds. “Now that it’s available for all users, we hope to learn more about the kinds of edits people make on mobile and build more advanced features, including possible Visual Editor integration, in future releases.”
The foundation says it has been trying to make mobile editing work on as many devices as possible, but reiterates that this is just the first release, so some may have be patient when it comes to that.
Wikipedia has been getting a lot more useful on mobile devices lately. In addition to getting new Siri integration on iOS 7, it recently got a new “Nearby” feature to surface location-relevant content, a mobile app for Wikimedia Commons, and the ability to upload photos from mobile.