On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 6:08 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 3:39 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
>> Tomasz Finc wrote:
>>> We're moving into our first testing stage for the new mobile extension
>>> and we'd love your help. You can find all the details on todays blog
>>> post at
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/06/10/testing-mobile-prototype/
>>
>> Forgive me, but I don't understand the purpose of a prototype wiki
that's
>> not really a prototype: there are no images or templates. The home page
>> (<http://nomad.tesla.usability.wikimedia.org/index.php/Main_Page>) seems
to
>> indicate that this is expected, but unless the goal is to have users test
>> how well red links render on their phone, I'm not sure what testing can be
>> done currently. Are the images and templates going to be imported?
Plenty actually. Were already getting bug reports and feedback on the
suggestions page so clearly people are able to use it.
Importing more pages can easily be done. We imported all MediaWiki
namespace messages and everything two levels deep from the MainPage of
each Wiki mentioned. Since the prototype servers don't have as much
space as the main cluster we have to balance the amount of content
with the resources available.
There's
way more than red links there: there's paragraph on paragraph of
text, with templates, images, category links, interlanguage links,
references, etc. Some bits are indeed missing and ought to be cleaned up for
further testing though -- and your feedback about that is valuable to the
people setting up the tests.
Just don't confuse giving feedback with blasting people into oblivion for
not being perfect on the first round.
I was asking if was a "Friday at five" issue or if it was intended. The Main
Page seems to indicate that it's intended behavior, which doesn't make any
sense. If you're calling on end users to participate in testing (through the
Wikimedia blog), yes, the prototypes should be in reasonably working order
first. Otherwise, put off the announcement until they are. I'm not trying to
blast anyone anywhere, I just don't understand why you'd announce to the
world that testing is ready when it isn't.
As mentioned before, people have been happily testing and we can
easily load in more content. No harm there.
I looked a bit closer at the prototype and can't
really figure out which
templates were and weren't imported. It also seems that importing doesn't
update certain tables (e.g., Special:ListFiles is empty), which sucks. You
must limit variables when testing, otherwise you'll end up with half the
feedback being "the page didn't render properly" when it was simply a lot
of
known missing content.
[snip]
That's client-side resizing, which is painful enough on a full web browser,
much less a mobile device. The wikicode specifies "|thumb|", which should
resize the image server-side, surely. I'm not sure what's going on there.
Awesome -- you found a bug! Apparently the system does work. :)
Well, no, the system doesn't work. That would be the bug. Most users are
going to report "site slow as shit" or simply get frustrated and leave
because they're downloading megabytes of images unknowingly. I think it's
great to solicit user feedback on the mobile project, but I think if it's a
muddled mess, the signal (actual problems in the extension) is going to be
drowned out by the noise (endless reports of brokenness in the prototypes).
Actually people have been filing rtl, line spacing, and other issues
instead of any speed issues.
--tomasz