Mobile-l February 2014

mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org

26 participants
30 discussions

Keep going mobile experiment badly thought out
by Jon Robson 11 Mar '14

11 Mar '14

Mobile is experimenting with showing a small banner at the top of the main page that prompts logged in editors to help a page in need of new links: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?mobileaction=beta I think this is _great_ and started playing with it on the train with nothing to do. Two improvements need to be made though: 1) It's difficult to know what to link to. I wrap words which I feel should be existing wiki pages but I pretty much have to guess or open a new window to check those. Some kind of search interface or link validation tool/corrector would be useful. 2) Since red links are turned off in the editor preview it can be tricky to know whether I caused a typo or linked correctly if new to wiki text. This is a bad first time user experience. Some kind of validation step or feedback when I create red links in the editor itself would be useful. We should at very least enable red links in the editor preview. On a side note: I really think we should give more priority to enabling new page creation on enwiki to help those sort of experiences before continuing down this path of encouraging new editors. People could start drafts, start pages with photos. This seems like a really useful focus of time.

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Re: [WikimediaMobile] [zero] The ghost of WAP in Zero world
by Adam Baso 01 Mar '14

01 Mar '14

*(Resending, got stuck in pending queue for size.)* Here's a trendline for about one month of usage. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_Zero_One_Month_WML_Percen… The figure seems to be holding between 0.2% and 0.3% for that most recent 1-month period of available WML usage data in Wikipedia Zero. Other content types are not counted in this WML percent; for example, the following hits on <language>.(m|zero).wikipedia.org are excluded: JSON, XML, PNGs, icons, JavaScript and CSS. Furthermore, content served from domains such as upload.wikimedia.org (media, including most article images) andbits.wikimedia.org (frequently accessed core UX elements such as JavaScript, CSS, icons, etc.) is not part of the denominator. The previous email referring to sub-0.1 percent WML /hit/ ratios on in-scope active carriers - for which I provided some rather basic analysis - holds. However, using the re-worked definition of WML percent described here there's a slightly higher skew. In addition to the PDF trendline, a quick and dirty look at the 20140214 log for active operators shows the following rough layout. Less than 0.5% WML Overall traffic in this zone is 77.03% of the W0 traffic; average of 0.05% WML in-zone Between 0.5% and 1.35% WML Overall traffic in this zone is 22.73% of the W0 traffic; average of 1.08% WML in-zone Between 1.35% and 4.9999999999% WML Overall traffic in this zone is 0.22% of the W0 traffic, average of 2.07% WML in-zone; 5% and higher WML Overall traffic in this bucket is 0.015% of the W0 traffic, average of 34.2% WML in-zone The percents don't add to 100 perfectly as a consequence of rounding. Generally, WML seems to be in decline across most Wikipedia Zero operators, but there are some exceptions (e.g., one operator's WML percent as defined here seems to be holding steady around 1% with this definition of WML, although I'm sort of skeptical of whether the user agent is actually WML-only or even a mobile device or is incapable of handling HTML). We're analyzing whether WML deprecation has a disparate impact measurable enough to defer exclusive concentration on HTML, especially in light of the increasing availability of cheap mobile devices supporting HTML and the tendency for large intermediary search services and appliances to translate HTML to WML on behalf of the actual client device in the rare case of a device only supporting WML. -Adam On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 12:41 PM, Yuri Astrakhan <yastrakhan(a)wikimedia.org>wrote: > I just ran some stats on the 1/1000 sample logs for ZERO traffic. Due to > nature of Zero - to bring Wikipedia to the developing world - we have to > deal with lots of old phones. I would like to reopen WAP discussion before > we put the final nail into the coffin or decide if this data warrants > further investigation. >

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Wikipedia new app sprint 25 builds available for Android
by Brion Vibber 27 Feb '14

27 Feb '14

Public Android build at https://releases.wikimedia.org/mobile/android/apps-android-wikipedia-sprint… iOS builds are currently limited to Wikimedia-internal distribution due to Apple installation restrictions. We may be able to open up to public betas again in a bit though. These versions now include basic account creation! Don't go too crazy testing it -- there are per-IP throttling limits in place and you can get yourself temporarily blocked if you register a lot of accounts. ;) -- brion

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Documentation: Issues setting up browser autodetection (Was [Design] Preview of the proposal for MediaWiki Homepage)
by Jon Robson 26 Feb '14

26 Feb '14

Thanks Isarra for your feedback! Mobile guys how can we improve this documentation and make it easier? On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 10:03 AM, Isarra Yos <zhorishna(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On 26/02/14 17:04, Jon Robson wrote: > >> MobileFrontend is an arse to setup and a lot of it is either specifically >> coded to suit Wikipedia, or it makes assumptions, such as the skin, that are >> often not viable for other projects at all. > > This comment greatly surprised me. MobileFrontend was previously very > difficult to set up but should now be very trivial. When did you last try? > [snip] > Set it up sometime in 2013, been running into problems ever since, mostly > with caching. As I recall we wound up having to direct mobile users to just > use an app that just made sure the mobile version was called. > > But it may be an issue with the documentation, then, especially this - > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MobileFrontend/Configuring_browser… > > It's unclear what you mean by 'front-end caching' - what all does this > cover? Is it just squid/varnish-type things, or does it include the file > cache as well? Many projects do use at least that. > The example varnish configuration appears to be missing. Can this be fixed? > [snip]

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Mobile Web & App Quarterly Review notes posted
by Tomasz Finc 25 Feb '14

25 Feb '14

For those not able to make it to our last quarterly review you can see our slides and notes posted on https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_r… Do take a note of a really important data point in slide 4 Wikipedia is approaching Mobile and Desktop convergence in late 2015 if trends hold. This means that by the end of 2015 we'll be seeing 50/50 split between mobile and desktop. This is a huge opportunity for our projects and we'll need the community as a whole to help us support this on coming growth. Over the next weeks and months you'll be seeing us actively build our goals for 2014-2015. Stay tuned for a very interesting year. --tomasz

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The last extension for TAEECE2014 deadline!
by The Second International Conference on Technological Advances in Electrical, Electronics and Computer Engineering (TAEECE2014) 24 Feb '14

24 Feb '14

*************************************************************************** We apologize for multiples copies. Please circulate this CFP among your colleagues and students. *************************************************************************** [TAEECE 2014] The Second International Conference on Technological Advances in Electrical, Electronics and Computer Engineering Important Dates Paper due: Feb. 28, 2014 Author Notification: March 01, 2014 or 4 weeks from the submission date Camera-ready due and Registration: March 08, 2014, however, it is recommended to do it few days before Conference Date: March 18-20, 2014 **************************************************************************** For more information: http://sdiwc.net/conferences/2014/taeece2014/ To submit your paper: http://sdiwc.net/conferences/2014/taeece2014/openconf/openconf.php ****************************************************************************

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three-letter language codes - fixed!
by Amir E. Aharoni 20 Feb '14

20 Feb '14

Hallo, The old annoying bug that didn't allow proper usage of three-letter language codes in Android apps appears to be fixed. Or maybe not. Here's the link: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=49120 The relevant MediaWiki bug: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36264 The last comment on the Android bug says: "The resource packaging system is still poorly designed, but now supports 3 letter locale codes and variants." The bug is not closed yet, however. I don't know the Android community well. What does it mean for us? Is it actually fixed already? Is the fix released? Can we use it? Will it work on all Android versions or only on the newest ones? -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

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Performance: 15KB wikipedia.ico file
by Yuri Astrakhan 20 Feb '14

20 Feb '14

I was looking at the page sizes, and noticed that the wikipedia.ico<http://bits.wikimedia.org/favicon/wikipedia.ico> file is 15KB, which is about 14% of the average m. page size. Unfortunatelly, this download is not reported by either firefox or chrome dev tools due to know <http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.mozilla.firefox.firebug/9253> bugs <https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=110449>, so it might have been overlooked in our site performance review. Can we shrink it somehow? Or is there a reason to keep it as is? I tried shrinking it with GIMP to 4bit - and got a 5x reduction. There are some color changes, but I don't know much about images, so possibly some pixel hunting by a designer is needed. Also, I tried 4bit+PNG option, which might not be supported by every browser, especially some mobile ones, and it got me an extra 569 bytes (21%) Lastly, do we really need 3 different sizes - 16,32,64? Can we do 16 & 64?

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WML Deprecation plan
by Dan Foy 18 Feb '14

18 Feb '14

The Wikimedia Foundation plans to remove support for WML for Wikimedia projects, in order to steer more development toward the web's de facto markup language, HTML, on mobile web browsers. A trial of the WML deprecation is slated to begin February 17, 2014, and assuming no major hiccups, will no longer be supported as of February 24, 2014. WML usage has fallen dramatically and appears to now be below 0.009% of hits across Wikipedia in general. Even in markets with greater feature phone usage, direct WML usage still falls below 0.1%; in some of these markets there is no WML usage. If you have concerns, please reply to this thread. Thanks, Dan -- Dan Foy Technical Manager, Mobile Partnerships Wikimedia Foundation

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[TAEECE2014] Submission Deadline has been EXTENDED
by The Second International Conference on Technological Advances in Electrical, Electronics and Computer Engineering (TAEECE2014) 16 Feb '14

16 Feb '14

**************** **************** **************** **************** We apologize for multiples copies. Please circulate this CFP among your colleagues and students. **************** **************** **************** **************** [TAEECE 2014] The Second International Conference on Technological Advances in Electrical, Electronics and Computer Engineering This conference, among other things, wants to bring together researchers to present and discuss novel approaches and solutions as well as recent results in this area of research, e.g. specially designed for Electronics Engineering, Electronics & Nano Electronics, Mobile Robotics, Networks Design, Protocols and Management, Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering. All registered papers will be published in one of the following special issues provided that the author do major improvements and extension within the time frame that will be set by the conference and his/her paper is approved by the chief editor: International Journal of New Computer Architectures and their Applications (IJNCAA) International Journal of Digital Information and Wireless Communications (IJDIWC) International Journal of Cyber-Security and Digital Forensics (IJCSDF) International Journal of Computer Aided Engineering and Technology (IJCAET) **************** **************** **************** **************** Important Dates **************** Paper due: Feb. 25, 2014 Author Notification: March 01, 2014 or 4 weeks from the submission date Camera-ready due and Registration: March 08, 2014, however, it is recommended to do it few days before Conference Date: March 18-20, 2014 **************** **************** **************** **************** For more information: http://sdiwc.net/conferences/2014/taeece2014/ To submit your paper: http://sdiwc.net/conferences/2014/taeece2014/openconf/openconf.php

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Mobile-l February 2014