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 mobile wikimedians,
The Wikimedia Foundation's iOS team is excited to announce our next major
release is up on the app store here:
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=32471523…
This is our first release focused on major improvements to the editing
features of the app. In this version we focused on the core wikitext
editing experience. We added:
- Syntax highlighting (based on CodeMirror 5) with for our accessible
color themes -- edit in dark mode!
- Wikitext toolbars for inserting markup and formatting
- Line numbers and majorly improved spacing and wrapping (see templates
and their variables easily!)
- Find-in-page within the wikitext
- Undo and redo
- After publishing a section, you're returned to that section in the
reading view
- Look and feel of editing and publishing updated to match the rest of
the app
This version makes some other improvements, and also sunsets our support
for Wikipedia Zero, but we're most excited about these new editing tools.
Let us know what you think! We've got a lot more good stuff coming for
editors, and your feedback will make whats next even better. If you'd like
to sign up to help beta test future versions, you can now sign up directly
here:
https://testflight.apple.com/join/Z0AU0KXC
As always, thanks to our patch submitters, testers, and translators for
their contributions.
Cheers,
Josh Minor
Product Manager, Wikipedia for iOS
The Wikimedia REST API's /page/summary response contains content_urls and
api_urls keys that provide convenience lists of various URLs of potential
interest to the consumer. These lists appear in other endpoint responses
as well, as the page summary response is transcluded in various places
throughout the REST API.
Currently, these URL strings are constructed erroneously using unencoded
page title strings. A proposed patch (
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/services/mobileapps/+/489329/)
applies encodeURIComponent to encode these before including them in URLs.
Since this endpoint is advertised as stable[1], I'm announcing the change
here in advance. Barring any objections, the change will be deployed late
next week.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/#!/Page_content/get_page_summary_title
--
Michael Holloway
Software Engineer, Reading Infrastructure
