I had two topics I wanted us to discuss and agree upon that are
causing lots of friction in mobile development and I would like us to
resolve in current designs and future designs. (Feel free to forward
to other mailing lists)
Articles Vs Pages Vs <insert word here>
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Recently all instances of the word 'article(s)' was switched with
'content pages' / 'pages'. This problem keeps recurring in our design
and is starting to become a nuisance. I see both sides here - 3rd
parties and even our own projects use our software in a different way
- sometimes pages are articles, sometimes they are definitions,
sometimes destinations etc etc.
However the word 'content page' and page is extremely ambiguous and
can be confusing.
One good example is the watchlist view on mobile - it provides the
ability to filter feeds by namespace:
This i18n change changed the word 'article' to 'content pages'. In
this context it makes no sense. Programmatically what it actually
means is show me only pages from the 'Main namespace' but to a reader
the word 'articles' is arguably more understandable than 'content
pages'. I would actually like us to continue using 'articles' but
explore ways other instances can customise this - e.g. switch the word
'articles' to other words based on what their project is about. It
would be nice for wikibooks to use the word 'books' for instance, and
wikitionary 'words' or 'definitions'. Is this feasible and worth
exploring? I feel like using the word pages at the benefit of
generalisation seriously damages the benefit of clear and easy to
understand language.
Limiting word length in mobile
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In addition to this the patch in question brought up a second topic:
word length on mobile. On the watchlist view we have several tabs as
illustrated in this question which are optimised for single words (and
potentially can be truncated using the ellipsis method if necessary)
http://imgur.com/Jiv0XPJ
As you can see in the diagram - 2 words do not work very well in this
kind of view. I suggested a qqq constraint to limit translations to
single words -
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/97935/ - do we think
these sorts of constraints are okay for mobile? Another approach to do
a similar design would be to use icons, but icons in themselves have
even greater problems for translation.