Hi all,
The experimental Trending Service[1] will be sunset on December 14th, 2017.
We initially deployed this service to evaluate some real time features in
the mobile apps centered on delivering more timely information to users.
After some research [2], we found that it did not perform well with users
in that use case.
At this point there are no further plans to integrate the service into our
products and so we are going to sunset the service to reduce the
maintenance burden for some of our teams.
We are going to do this more quickly than we would for a full stable
production API as the usage of the end point is extremely low and mostly
from our own internal projects. If you this adversely affects any of your
work or you have any other concerns, please let the myself or the Reading
Infrastructure team know.
Thanks to all the teams involved with developing, deploying, researching
and maintaining this service.
P.S. This service was based off of prototypes Jon Robson had developed for
detecting trending articles. He will be continuing his work in this area. I
encourage you to reach out to him if you were interested in this project.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/#!/Feed/trendingEdits
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Comparing_most_read_and_trending_e…
--
Corey Floyd
Engineering Manager
Readers
Wikimedia Foundation
cfloyd(a)wikimedia.org
Hi everyone,
We're excited to bring you an updated version of the Wikipedia Android app
<https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia&hl=en>, now
available on the Google Play store [1]! Here are the highlights from this
release (or browse the complete change history
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/APAW/history/master/;r/2.7.221-…>
):
- The Explore feed is now fully customizable! Access the customization
screen from the overflow menu in the feed or in each card, and make the
feed your own: enable or disable the types of cards you want to see, and
rearrange the order in which they are shown.
- New and improved Randomizer: tap the Randomizer card in the Explore feed,
and swipe through random article previews from Wikipedia, without
navigating to the full article right away. Try it out!
- On This Day: the Explore feed now contains cards with a selected
historical event that happened on the current day of the year. Tap the card
to see a full-screen view of all events from history that occurred on this
day.
- Black theme: we've heard your feedback, and added a black theme in
addition to the current light and dark themes. Perfect for AMOLED displays
and nighttime reading, this provides a fully black background throughout
most of the app.
- Plenty of minor enhancements and bug fixes.
[1] For devices without Google Play services, you may download
<https://releases.wikimedia.org/mobile/android/wikipedia/stable/wikipedia-2.…>
the app directly.
Cheers,
--
Dmitry Brant
Senior Software Engineer (Android)
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_mobile_engineering
Hello mobile Wikimedians,
The Wikipedia iOS team today released a minor update to the app store:
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=32471523…
This update is a minor bug fix which addresses issues with In the News
content (particularly for English), and also fixes some peek-and-pop
issues.
If you used iOS 9, this will be our last supported release, and we strongly
recommend you update to this version.
Thanks,
Josh Minor
Product Manager, iOS
Hi
The whole Kiwix team is proud to announce the first release of Kiwix JS
for Windows (mobile) devices. It is available in the Microsoft app
store: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/p/kiwix-js/9p8slz4j979j
Kiwix JS for Windows runs on all recent Windows OSes but is in
particular thought for Windows Mobile and all Windows based mobile users
for whom we had so far no solution.
The app has been developed in the last 6 months based on the Kiwix JS
code base already used in Kiwix Firefox and Chrome Web extensions. It is
not fully featured like Kiwix for Android or iOS and is a bit slower...
but it is still really easy to use and can read all ZIM files.
We really hope it will find its public and that we will be supported
with feedbacks.
Regards
Emmanuel
--
Kiwix - Wikipedia Offline & more
* Web: http://www.kiwix.org
* Twitter: https://twitter.com/KiwixOffline
* more: http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Communication
The Readers web team will be deploying a new feature this week to make it
easier to download PDF versions of articles on the mobile website. [0]
Providing better offline functionality was one of the highlighted areas of
focus based on the generative research done by the New Readers team in
Mexico, Nigeria, and India. Over the past year, the New Readers and
Readers Web teams created a prototype for mobile PDFs which was evaluated
by user research and community feedback [1]. As the prototype evaluation
received positive feedback and results, we went forward with development.
[2]
For the initial deployment, the feature will be available to Google Chrome
browsers on Android with support for other mobile browsers to come in the
future. For Chrome, the feature will use the native Android print
functionality where users can choose to download a webpage as a PDF.
Mobile print styles will be used for these PDFs to ensure optimal
readability for smaller screens. [3]
The feature will be available starting Wednesday, Nov 15. For more
information, see the project page on MediaWiki.org. [0]
[0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Projects/Mobile_PDFs
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_Readers/Offline
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_Readers/Offline#Concept_testing_for_mob…
[3]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Projects/Print_Styles#Mobile_Pri…
--
Olga Vasileva // Product Manager // Reading Web Team
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
Hello mobile Wikimedians,
This afternoon we released a minor update to the App Store:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wikipedia/id324715238?mt=8
This version adds an improved article preview experience (for 3d touch
users), a fix for pull-to-refresh issues and other small fixes and
stability improvements.
As usual, thanks to our testers, translators and code contributors, we
couldn't do it without you.
Thanks,
Josh Minor