Hi everyone,
*tl;dr: We'll be stripping all content contained inside brackets from the
first sentence of articles in the Wikipedia app.*
The Mobile Apps Team is focussed on making the app a beautiful and engaging
reader experience, and trying to support use cases like wanting to look
something up quickly to find what it is. Unfortunately, there are several
aspects of Wikipedia at present that are actively detrimental to that goal.
One example of this are the lead sentences.
As mentioned in the other thread on this matter
<https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mobile-l/2015-March/008715.html>,
lead sentences are poorly formatted and contain information that is
detrimental to quickly looking up a topic. The team did a quick audit
<https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheets/d/1BJ7uDgzO8IJT0M3UM2q…>
of
the information available inside brackets in the first sentences, and
typically it is pronunciation information which is probably better placed
in the infobox rather than breaking up the first sentence. The other
problem is that this information was typically inserted and previewed on a
platform where space is not at a premium, and that calculation is different
on mobile devices.
In order to better serve the quick lookup use case, the team has reached
the decision to strip anything inside brackets in the first sentence of
articles in the Wikipedia app.
Stripping content is not a decision to be made lightly. People took the
time to write it, and that should be respected. We realise this is
controversial. That said, it's the opinion of the team that the problem is
pretty clear: this content is not optimised for users quickly looking
things up on mobile devices at all, and will take a long time to solve
through alternative means. A quicker solution is required.
The screenshots below are mockups of the before and after of the change.
These are not final, I just put them together quickly to illustrate what
I'm talking about.
- Before: http://i.imgur.com/VwKerbv.jpg
- After: http://i.imgur.com/2A5PLmy.jpg
If you have any questions, let me know.
Thanks,
Dan
--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation
Hello all,
As mentioned previously, the current version of the Android app contains an
A/B test where it presents "read more" suggestions to the user, based on
(a) the standard "morelike" query, or (b) the new "opening_text" query.
Here are the results from the last ~10 days of the test[0]:
- The clickthrough rate using the default morelike query is (and has been)
around 15%.
- With the new opening_text query, the clickthrough rate decreases to about
12%:
[image: Inline image 1]
Therefore, it seems that the new query has a nontrivial negative effect on
CTR :(
We'll plan on removing this test in the next release of the app, but we'll
be happy to plug in a different or updated query, if it will be of further
use to Discovery.
[0]
https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheets/d/1BFsrAcPgexQyNVemmJ3…
(queries embedded as comments in the headers)
--
Dmitry Brant
Senior Software Engineer / Product Owner (Android)
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_mobile_engineering
Hello mobile Wikimedians,
The iOS team is glad to announce a second beta release for the upcoming
5.0.3 version of the app.
5.0.3 is a minor release to address bugs and usability issues reported by
users. We've fixed the Main Pages so that they update as expected, patched
an issue with log-ins and fixed some crashes, especially with image display.
In addition to bug fixes, this release also adds text size adjustment for
articles, supports iPad split-view multi-tasking, and gives users much more
control over language preferences (including re-order and deletion). We
also enabled support for Myanmar (my) and Khmer (km) language Wikipedias.
This is our release candidate build for this version, so if you are a beta
tester please take a moment to install from TestFlight soon. Testers
can provide
feedback at this form: http://goo.gl/forms/rLVmFLzus2 Oh, or just respond
to this email...
If you are not a tester but want to be, please sign up here:
http://goo.gl/forms/eAN1qjcm7I
Thanks,
Wikimedia Foundation iOS team
Cross posting in case you don't follow wikitech-l.The following looks to be
up for discussion today on #wikimedia-office:
*** T122942: RFC: Support language variants in the REST API
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rob Lanphier <robla(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 6:19 PM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] ArchCom RFC update #6
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi everyone,
Here is the RFC status update from last week's ArchCom meeting (E165).
This is pretty much what is posted on-wiki [1], where everything has
links.
Rob
----
==== Today's IRC session ====
** April 20 [[Phab:E66/31]]
*** T91162: RFC: Shadow namespaces
==== Queue for future RfC office hours ====
** April 27: [[Phab:E66/32]]
*** T122942: RFC: Support language variants in the REST API
** May 4: [[Phab:E66/33]]
*** T130528: RFC: PSR-6 Cache interface in Mediawiki core
==== Under discussion ====
:Daniel: [[Phab:T124752]]
::Let’s turn the “Changes Tags” refactoring proposed by
[
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/owner:cenarium.sysop%2540gmail.com+statu…
Cenarium] into an RFC and get it unstuck. Chain of patches starts at
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/201905/64; The patch refers to
[[Phab:T91535]] but the topic is broader than that, and the ticket
doesn’t fully describe the proposed solution. Needs work.
: Tim: shepherding two for Parser. will pick another
: Roan: [[Phab:T108655]] still need to split it so discussion can take
place on part 2
==== Other status ====
The "RFC inbox" was empty, nothing "Entering Final Comment Period",
and we didn't discuss the "no activity" list
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_committee/2016-04-20#RFC_status…
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Hi there - I had a follow up action from a backlog grooming meeting today
regarding https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T133023.
We're taking the discussion about this task to mobile-l and qa where we can
make sure our discussion is documented and also get some additional
opinions.
Proper test coverage and test coverage maintenance is a mildly complex
topic, to put it lightly, but let's see if we can discuss here on mobile-l
and qa lists and figure out how to tackle these sorts of tasks.
-Adam
Hi all,
AuthManager is coming soon (see the recent wikitech email [1] for more
details), which means mobile login and registration (whether API- or
specialpage-based) will have to adapt to the increased flexibility of the
authentication system. The new web-based login page uses HTMLForm to
generate the fields (the vform flavor, for now); I'm hoping that works
acceptably on mobile.
Unfortunately none of us working on AuthManager have a lot of experience
with mobile design, nor have access to a large variety of devices, so we
would very much appreciate any help with testing, or pointers on what to
look for. If you are interested, the current test site is at
http://authmanager.wmflabs.org/ with a mobile version at
http://mobile-authmanager.wmflabs.org/ .
[1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2016-April/085337.html
Hello, mobile Wikimedians,
The iOS team is excited to announce the first beta of our upcoming 5.0.3
release.
5.0.3 is a minor release to address bugs and usability issues reported by
users. We've fixed the Main Pages so that they update as, patched an issue
with log-ins and fixed some crashes, especially with image display.
In addition to bug fixes, this release also adds text size adjustment for
articles, supports iPad split-view multi-tasking, and gives users much more
control over language preferences (including re-order and deletion).
We are working on a few more changes, but wanted to get this in testers
hands while we finish up.
If you are not already a beta tester, and would like to join, please sign
up here: http://goo.gl/forms/eAN1qjcm7I
Feedback about the beta can be given via this form:
http://goo.gl/forms/rLVmFLzus2
Thanks,
Corey
--
Corey Floyd
Software Engineer
Mobile Apps / iOS
Wikimedia Foundation
Hello,
On 15 April 2016 at 01:04, Gabriel Wicke <gwicke(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Final reminder on this: We are planning to finally sunset
> rest.wikimedia.org in the week starting April 25th, 1 1/2 weeks from
> now. Please move your REST API clients to /api/rest_v1/ at the regular
> project domains instead!
>
This will happen in a week's time. We are, however, still observing quite a
volume of requests for mobile sections endpoints using the
rest.wikimedia.org domain. Specifically, almost all of the requests are
asking for resources pertaining to the de.wikipedia.org domain.
Unfortunately no user-agent header is provided so we are not able to
pin-point the client. Please ensure your clients point to
https://{domain}/api/rest_v1/
instead of https://rest.wikimedia.org/{domain}/v1/.
Cheers,
Marko
>
> Thanks,
>
> Gabriel
>
> On Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 11:00 AM, Gabriel Wicke <gwicke(a)wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
> > We have decided to officially retire the rest.wikimedia.org domain in
> > favor of /api/rest_v1/ at each individual project domain. For example,
> >
> >
> > https://rest.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia.org/v1/?doc
> >
> > becomes
> >
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/?doc
> >
> > Most clients already use the new path, and benefit from better
> > performance from geo-distributed caching, no additional DNS lookups,
> > and sharing of TLS / HTTP2 connections.
> >
> > We intend to shut down the rest.wikimedia.org entry point around
> > March, so please adjust your clients to use /api/rest_v1/ soon.
> >
> > Thank you for your cooperation,
> >
> > Gabriel
> >
> > --
> > Gabriel Wicke
> > Principal Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation
>
>
>
> --
> Gabriel Wicke
> Principal Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation
>
> _______________________________________________
> Engineering mailing list
> Engineering(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/engineering
>
--
Marko Obrovac, PhD
Senior Services Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation
