#Google - thank you for pushing #mobile #phone support

Putting your money where your mouth is is a wonderful thing. Google just did that again. Not by serving notice that support for mobile phones is important but by giving it teeth.

Recently it did it with Fi. A new product that will shake up an industry.

From now those websites that are not providing proper support for mobile phones are out of luck. Google does it where it hurts them most; it is in their ranking.

When you "google" (the verb), you will see those web sites first that are ranked the highest. Websites that do not function properly on mobile phones will go the way of the dodo as their ranking will plummet; they will not get the same results and providing quality support for mobile phones is how damage may be repaired.

Wikipedia is said to have a problem here. It is not exactly a mobile friendly website. For that it has a special subdomain and, that does not count. So all the things we know that make life better for the one area where we are growing.

It is no longer a zero sum game. We will be hurt in our prime objective when we do not ensure that Wikipedia and all the sister projects. We rely heavily on the Google ranking. It is no longer a matter of personal preference and making noises to stop progress in its track. It is about the very essence of what we do: sharing in the sum of all knowledge.

It is great to know that our software is at a stage where it is quite good at supporting mobile phones. I am grateful for the forward thinking of the WMF to get us here. The next step is to bring it to all our projects and pages.

For old fogeys like me, we could have https://en.of.wikipedia.org so that we can live in our past.
Thanks,
     GerardM