Dmitry, Monte, James, Vibha and I just met to discuss where to go with syntax highlighting in the apps.

For a variety of technical reasons, implementing VisualEditor in the apps is a gigantic undertaking. The Mobile Apps team left wondering whether there are lower-hanging fruit that we can run with in the meantime. So we're looking at syntax highlighting for wikitext to make it easier for users to understand.

Dmitry has a working prototype (example screenshot). On discussing this prototype, we were wary that while multi-coloured highlighting makes a lot of sense for programmers it may not make sense for newer users who aren't programmers, and may actually have the opposite of intended effect of making wikitext more scary. Oops!

The way we're going to proceed is by changing the colour of all the highlighting to grey. That way, the actual content in the wikitext is brought to the foreground. The exception will be wikilinks; the text will be black, but the brackets will be grey. Hopefully this will help users make the association between the wikitext and the reader experience more apparent. We need to choose the right colour such that the text doesn't look disabled and disincline people from touching it if they want to, but we can do that!

Since this is a side-project and potentially could make the experience a lot worse if we do it wrong, this is just going to be pushed to the Wikipedia Beta app on Android, and we'll analyse the data. We are only going to push this to production if the data strongly supports our hypothesis (i.e. the bounce rate on the edit screen is significantly reduced). If the data does not support this, or is inconclusive, we'll look at other ways to test this hypothesis.

Special thanks to James for offering his editing domain knowledge to us for this meeting. :-)

Let me know if there any questions!

Thanks,

Dan

--