Hi
We have published a new maintenance release of Kiwix for iOS 1.9 branch.
Here is a short changelog:
* Fix memory usage issue when performing searches
* swift 5.2
* Version bump of libkiwix, realm and SwiftyUserDefaults
* Removed third party library ProcedureKit, now use
Foundation.OperationQueue to handle async tasks
Kiwix for iOS has been conceived for iPhone & iPad devices.
The app is available on iTunes at http://ios.kiwix.org.
Please share with us problems and remarks:
https://github.com/kiwix/apple/issues
Enjoy
Emmanuel
--
Kiwix - Wikipedia Offline & more
* Web: http://www.kiwix.org
* Twitter: https://twitter.com/KiwixOffline
* more: http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Communication
Hi, I am noticing that the usability of ENWP talk pages on mobile seems to
be improving. I would like to say a brief thank you to the people who have
worked on this. For me, the small interface changes make a significant
difference for usability.
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
Hi folks,
I wanted to highlight a few really interesting pieces of data/stats
regarding the release of the Suggested Edits feature on Wikipedia app for
Android. These come from the daily report
<https://analytics.wikimedia.org/datasets/wikipedia-android-app-reports/sugg…>,
which is also where you'll find a brief description of the feature.
First, at this time 25.3% of editors (whose contributions are being tracked
since launch of the backend) have unlocked the feature by making the 5+ title
description edits
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Short_descriptions>
currently required to unlock it. (See: unlock stats
<https://analytics.wikimedia.org/datasets/wikipedia-android-app-reports/sugg…>)
That's 632 editors out of the 2495 editors who have made at least one title
description edit since April 5th. We have plans to experiment with this
threshold and see what happens if we lower the barrier to entry.
By the way, we don’t expect all logged-in users to edit or unlock the
feature (by making the required number of title description edits), as
there are incentives on the mobile apps to use an account just for reading
(e.g. reading list syncing
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/2018/05/25/synced-reading-lists/>).
However, perhaps we should advertise this ability better (especially to
logged-in users) and that those title descriptions don’t require any
knowledge of wikitext.
And since the production release, the feature has had a steady stream of
20+ users unlocking it per day. What are our users doing with it once they
unlock it? They’ve been using it! (Sorry if the text in the included graph
is too small to be legible, it's larger in the report.)
Nearly half of all title description edits made with the Android app each
day are coming in from editors using the Suggested Edits feature to add &
translate descriptions. More than half, even, on some days! Furthermore,
some of those edits are made by users who have previously used the feature.
Every day we have some editors who are using Suggested Edits for the first
time, but there are also quite a few who are returning to the Editor Tasks
screen & contributing more. (See: edit stats
<https://analytics.wikimedia.org/datasets/wikipedia-android-app-reports/sugg…>
)
“Okay, so what’s the quality of those 200-400 descriptions being added
every day?” you might ask. Well, one way we can check that is to check how
many of those edits are reverted within 48 hours. Turns out, almost none of
them:
This is especially impressive when compared to the proportion of other
title description edits that are reverted. (See: revert rate
<https://analytics.wikimedia.org/datasets/wikipedia-android-app-reports/sugg…>
)
When the user goes to the Suggested Edits screen and opens a task, they
begin receiving suggestions of articles to add descriptions to (or
translate descriptions, if they have unlocked that next tier of Suggested
Edits). On average, users express interest in editing 30-40% of those
suggestions. Among the suggestions they tapped to edit, they end up
actually making an edit around 60% of the time (although the average varies
from 40% to 70%). (See: interactions
<https://analytics.wikimedia.org/datasets/wikipedia-android-app-reports/sugg…>
and other engagement stats
<https://analytics.wikimedia.org/datasets/wikipedia-android-app-reports/sugg…>
)
Since the suggested edits are currently completely random, this leaves us
with a lot of room for improvement by, say, employing machine learning and
simple recommendation systems to suggest articles without title
descriptions that are similar to articles the user has added title
descriptions to previously. (Just a thought.) For example, in my own
experience with the suggestions I tend to skip articles that I don’t feel
confident enough to write short descriptions for, which are often articles
well outside my interests.
We’re still in the first month of the production release, so it’s hard to
draw conclusions about the longevity of this feature. These early numbers
are promising, and hopefully the number of editors using this feature
continues to grow because then those editors might be inspired to edit
articles too (if they haven’t yet). Of course, if we see people get bored
over time we might have to consider ways to encourage/inspire long-term
use. We also have plans to explore ways to recognize users for their
contributions.
So congratulations to the Android & Reading Infrastructure teams and
congrats to Rita Ho (now on the Growth team) for an impressive release. We
all look forward to the addition of image caption translation and seeing
the impact of the expanded Suggested Edits v2 on Structured Data on Commons.
Thanks for reading! :D
Cheers,
Mikhail
--
*Mikhail Popov*, Data Analyst (he/him)
Product Analytics <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Product_Analytics> //
Audiences <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Audiences> // Wikimedia
Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Other info (including PGP): https://people.wikimedia.org/~bearloga/
Hi
We have published a new maintenance release of Kiwix for iOS 1.9 branch.
Here is a short changelog:
* updated user feedback email address
* dropped support for external indexes
* improved iOS 12 support
* new version of libkiwix and Swift 4.2
Kiwix for iOS has been conceived for iPhone & iPad devices.
The app is available on iTunes at http://ios.kiwix.org.
Please share with us problems and remarks:
https://github.com/kiwix/apple/issues
Enjoy
Emmanuel
--
Kiwix - Wikipedia Offline & more
* Web: http://www.kiwix.org
* Twitter: https://twitter.com/KiwixOffline
* more: http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Communication
Hi everyone,
We're pleased to release our latest update to the Wikipedia Android app
<https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia&hl=en>, now
available on the Google Play store.
We may have missed a release email to this list for our previous minor
release, so here is a cumulative list of highlights since our last update:
* *Suggested edits*: The app now has a screen (accessible from the left
navigation menu) that offers suggestions for items to edit. For this
initial release, this is limited to adding and translating Wikidata
descriptions. In future updates, this will be expanded to suggest other
types of edits.
Note that this feature must be "unlocked" to be accessible: you'll need to
add or edit at least five (5) Wikidata descriptions in the usual way (using
the edit icon while reading an article), then wait a while to make sure
your edits are not reverted. The app will then notify you when the feature
is unlocked.
* *Improved editing interface*: The article editing screen has a number of
new conveniences, including the ability to change the font size of the
wikitext window, the ability to find text within the wikitext window, and a
series of "syntax" buttons at the bottom, to simplify adding or modifying
the wikitext syntax at the cursor, as well as "undo" and "redo" buttons.
* *Sepia theme*: As usual, you can change the app's theme in Settings, or
from the bottom toolbar while reading an article.
* *"Continue reading" bar*: When browsing the Feed, or looking at your
reading lists, you will now see a "continue reading" bar at the bottom that
displays your current topmost tab, along with the total number of open tabs
you currently have.
* *Enhanced table of contents control*: The table of contents now features
a circular "thumb" scroller that you can hold down and drag to scroll
quickly through different sections of the article, while highlighting the
section that is currently in focus.
* *Improved search in reading lists*: Searching within the Reading Lists
screen will now match results from individual articles in any of your
reading lists, as well as the names of reading lists themselves.
Check it out, and happy reading (and editing)!
Cheers,
--
Dmitry Brant
Senior Software Engineer (Android)
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_mobile_engineering
Hi all,
last week we've successfully brought the improved font choice to our mobile
skin MinervaNeue onto all wikis.
It helps to provide our users a better reading experience – across
languages, in and beyond latin scripts and a more modern typographic feel
to many of our text-focussed projects, taking advantage of specifically
designed and optimized fonts for every major system.
Technically we're applying an operating system font first stack for running
text (every text element besides main page titles, headings of 2nd order,
blockquotes, code snippets, basically most of every page) on mobile devices
for most popular systems[0].
Thanks to everybody who has helped in the process of this project, Nirzar
Pangarkar for bringing the idea to the table[1], Jon Robson, Jan Drewniak,
and the rest of Reading Web team for co-researching and supporting the
implementation, Alex Hollender for fine-tuning design parts as well as
documenting pre- and post-change, Brad Jorsch for important reminder of
learnings from the Typography Refresh 2014 and Chris Koerner for
accompanying the communication externally along the way.
You can read more on the details on the project page and at the Phabricator
task.
Please let us know if you have any questions or further feedback, either by
responding to me or on the project's talk page[2].
[0] -
https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Design/Projects/Improve_mobile_reading_experie…
[1] - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T175877
[2] -
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Design/Projects/Improve_mobile_reading_…
Enjoy and best regards,
Volker
--
Senior UX Engineer, Lead User-Interface Standardization
Wikimedia Foundation
volker.e(a)wikimedia.org | @Volker_E
Hi all,
Version 2.10 of the Commons Android app has just been released to
production on the Google Play Store[1] (also downloadable on F-Droid[2]).
The update contains:
New features:
- Users can search for (and upload pictures for) places that need pictures
in any location, not just their current location
- Current ongoing campaigns, if any, are displayed on the main screen
- "Retry" button to easily re-upload failed uploads
Fixes:
- Optimized Nearby map loading time
- Fixed various bugs and crashes, including errors with "image taken" date
We're excited to announce that we've also had our recent Project Grant
proposal[3] approved. :) This means there will be lots of improvements
coming up in 2019, with focus on improving stability and the upload
experience for users.
Our first priority will be rewriting the legacy backend code to adhere to
modern standards and reduce complexity (especially the network layer, which
currently uses a deprecated API). This is aimed at resolving a few major
lingering bugs (especially upload failures for a few users), as well as
creating a solid technical foundation to base future improvements on.
Several new features are slated for release after that, including filters
and bookmarks for the "Nearby places that needs pictures" feature, a pause
and resume function for uploads, and a "limited connection" mode.
Thank you so much to everyone who has supported us thus far, especially in
the last rocky year! :) At the conclusion of this grant, we hope to deliver
a much better app to you.
Best regards,
Josephine / @misaochan (project maintainer)
[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.free.nrw.commons
[2]: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=fr.free.nrw.commons
[3]:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Commons_app/Commons_Android_…
Hi all,
in my part of the Design team at Wikimedia Foundation, I'd like to
share an upcoming change in typography, that might be of interest for
you:
Improving reading experience on mobile [0] –
As many of our projects are putting textual content first, we are
consistently aiming at best possible reading experience for our users,
regardless of the device, software, or language of our readers.
Typography, and specifically font choices, build the base for
readability.
Therefore we have been proposing to rely on so-called system fonts as
our default mobile font choice in the mobile skin MinervaNeue. Both
major platforms, iOS and Android, but also operating systems like
macOS and Windows come out-of-box with better suited system fonts than
the general fallback `sans-serif`. Those specific fonts
- deliver a better native experience for readers,
- improve cross-platform and
- improve cross-language readability.
Please see the project page on mediawiki.org [0] for further technical
details of the changes and an overview of our wide-range testing. Our
current plan is to rollout the change to Beta-Cluster next week.
We welcome your feedback!
Best regards,
Volker
[0] – https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Design/Projects/Improve_mobile_reading_exper…
Senior UX Engineer, UI Standardization Lead (he/him)
Wikimedia Foundation
volker.e(a)wikimedia.org | @Volker_E
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