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 Everyone,
I am writing to share with you an effort from the Android team to
start identifying
themes of products
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Readers_contributions> [0] that
would allow readers to create micro-contributions that are welcomed and
actually needed by fellow Wikipedia editors.
The team has already identified 18 ideas as examples of tasks readers can
do to help editors, we would like to expand the conversation to help us
evaluate the importance of the idea*s*. While thinking, the team already
had criteria for evaluating the ideas
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Readers_contributions/Reading_team_t…>,
but this is still missing community input on how ideas are evaluated and
what would actually get high votes for being something that matters, in
order for the team to start working on. Please feel encouraged to add
more ideas and adjust criteria for evaluation if needed.
This work is a continuation of the reading consultation
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_Interaction_Consultation> earlier done
in April. The team is excited to continue the conversation early with the
community in order to define product themes.
Ideas promoted from this conversation will be designed in Android first,
given the consideration of lower traffic and relative ease of
implementation, but the team will be excited and watching for lessons
learned in order to move ideas to the web.
This work is made possible by Jon Katz, Reading team's senior PM, and
Dmitry Brant, the product owner of Android. Thanks for their thoughtful
and collaborative approach".
We will allow the conversation to run for a month, after which we can
already start exploring ideas for implementation in Q3. Please help spread
the word across village pumps.
Looking forward to your input --
Best,
Moushira
Community Liaison for Reading team
[0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Readers_contributions
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Readers_
contributions/Reading_team_thoughts
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_Interaction_Consultation
Hello,
This morning the WMF's iOS app team released version 5.1.0 to the app store
[1]
This version includes:
*- Search within articles!!!*
- New designs to make reading and exploring on iPads even better
- Faster browsing for users with large histories and saved page libraries
- Nearby recommendations that are more relevant to your current location
- Ability for 3rd party apps to open specific articles or searches via URL
- Lots of other small fixes!
Special thanks to volunteer contributors kevintaniguchi and jberkel for
their excellent additions! And as always thanks to our beta testers for
your bug reports and feedback.
[1] - https://itunes.apple.com/th/app/wikipedia/id324715238?mt=8
Thanks,
Josh Minor
PM, Wikipedia for iOS
fyi.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Emmanuel Engelhart <kelson(a)kiwix.org>
Date: Sat, Aug 27, 2016 at 9:59 AM
Subject: [Offline-l] [INFO] ZIM standard library 1.3 is out!
To: Using Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki offline <
offline-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, "kiwix-developer(a)lists.sourceforge.net" <
kiwix-developer(a)lists.sourceforge.net>, "kiwix-testing(a)lists.sourceforge.net"
<kiwix-testing(a)lists.sourceforge.net>
Cc: Mailing list for Wikimedia CH <wikimediach-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi
After almost two years since the last release, the new libzim is out:
http://www.openzim.org/download/zimlib-1.3.tar.gz
This new release brings a few improvements and bugs fixes:
* FIXED: zimdump crash with long filenames
* FIXED: few portability issues
* NEW: method to get real file offset of article in ZIM
* NEW: smarter article cluster building (+5% compression)
* NEW: one pass writing process (instead of two)
These improvements allow easier:
* new bindings (like node-libzim)
* new features of the ZIM format, like integrating the fulltext search index
* creation of more ZIM files (speed-up ZIM creation)
This improvements have been done by a few developers mostly during our
Kiwix hackathon @Wikimania Esino. This has been made possible with the
support of:
* Fondation Orange
* Wikimedia CH
* Wikimedia Foundation
* Bibliothèque sans frontière
More information about the project openZIM and the ZIM format at:
http://www.openzim.org/
Regards
Emmanuel Engelhart
--
Kiwix - Wikipedia Offline & more
* Web: http://www.kiwix.org
* Twitter: https://twitter.com/KiwixOffline
* more: http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Communication
_______________________________________________
Offline-l mailing list
Offline-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/offline-l
FYI after much experimentation, research and testing the mobile site has
been lazy loading images [1] since Thursday 18th August. This means if you
do not see an image you will not download it. We have taken care to ensure
users without JavaScript can still view images and that most users will
barely notice the difference.
We are currently crunching the data this change has made and we plan to
write a blog post to reporting the results.
In our experiments on Japanese Wikipedia we saw a drop in image bytes per
page view by 54% On the Japanese Japan article bytes shipped to users
dropped from 1.443 MB to 142 kB.
This is pretty huge since bytes equate to money [3] and we expect this to
be significant on wikis where mobile data is more expensive. In a nutshell
Wikipedia mobile is cheaper.
As I said blog post to follow once we have more information, but please
report any bugs you are seeing with the implementation (we have already
found a few thanks to our community of editors).
~Jon
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Projects/Performance/Lazy_loadin…
[2]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Lazy_loading_of_images_on_Japane…
[3] https://whatdoesmysitecost.com/
Hello mobile Wikimedians,
We've just posted another beta to TestFlight for the next release of the
Wikipedia app for iOS. We expect this to be the final beta before we
release to 5.1 to the store next week. This release includes:
- Search for text within page
- Major improvements to reading and browsing experience on iPads
- Performance improvements for user with large numbers of Saved and
Recent pages
- Make most recent Nearby item in the feed a little more "near"
- Ability for other apps to open the Wikipedia app to specific articles
or even search results (huge thanks to contributor jberkel)
- Many other small bug fixes and improvements
Thanks,
Josh Minor
Product Manager
Hello,
A fresh version of our upcoming 5.1 release should now be available to Beta testers via TestFlight. This version improves the reading and Explore experience for large screen devices and add find-in-page functionality to the article toolbar.
As always we appreciate our testers feedback, bug reports and support. Especially if you use the app on a tablet or Plus device!
Thanks and have a nice weekend,
Josh Minor
PM, Wikipedia app for iOS
