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
Howdy,
There is an IRC office hour scheduled next week to discuss
improvements to the mobile MediaWiki web site for contribution tools
and workflows. It will be from 16:00-17:00 UTC Monday 25 June 2018.
Links to join are on Meta. [0]
The Readers web team would like to make more contribution tools (like
Special: pages) available on mobile. Come talk to us about what you
want to see the most. More information on what we'd like to discuss
can be found on MediaWiki.org. [1]
I hope you can make it. If not, please take a look at the project page
and leave any comments on the talk page.
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours#Upcoming_office_hours
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Advanced_mobile_contributions
Yours,
Chris Koerner
Community Liaison
Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation's iOS team today published a minor update to the
Wikipedia app. You can download it here:
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=32471523…
This version, v5.8.2, contains a goodly number of usability improvements
and bug fixes, including:
- More responsive search box
- Larger font size options for large/super high resolution devices
- Support for pronunciation guides' embedded audio clips
- Fixes for swipe and force touch actions in many places, especially on
Saved pages
- Layout issues with widgets
Among many others!
Special thanks to volunteer Sedgie27 for the patch! As usual also many
thanks to our translators and testers.
Cheers,
Josh Minor
Product Manager, Wikipedia for iOS
Hi
We have published a new maintenance release of Kiwix for iOS 1.9 branch.
Here is the short changelog:
- Use Realm in replace of CoreData as database
- Added Wiktionary, Wikiquote and Wikisource categories
- Fix: unable to detect embedded index in some situations
- Fix: unable to cancel erroneous download tasks
The app is available on iTunes at http://ios.kiwix.org.
Enjoy
Emmanuel
--
Kiwix - Wikipedia Offline & more
* Web: http://www.kiwix.org
* Twitter: https://twitter.com/KiwixOffline
* more: http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Communication
The slide deck from last week's quarterly metrics presentation of the
Wikimedia Foundation's Audiences department has been published.[1]
This deck gives an overview over core metrics regarding readership and
contributors of Wikimedia sites, expanding the scope of the readers
core metrics presentations given in previous quarters. It can be
regarded as an appendix to the May 2018 quarterly check-ins of the WMF
Audiences department (in particular of the Readers and Contributors
teams). [2]
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_Audiences_metr…
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/Quarterly_…
--
Tilman Bayer
Senior Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB
