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
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
Hello everyone,
We are looking for an experimented Android developer with a good sense for UX to prepare the version 3 of Kiwix Android. This new version would include the following:
Stabilisation of the ZIM download service;
Full revamping of the library UI;
Improve automated testing infrastructure;
Improve continuous integration.
The full posting is here: https://www.kiwix.org/android-dev/ <https://www.kiwix.org/android-dev/>
If you are interested, or think you know someone who could be interested, feel free to reach out at jobs(a)kiwix.org <mailto:jobs@kiwix.org>
Cheers,
Stephane
Hello mobile Wikipedians,
The Wikimedia Foundations' iOS team has released a first beta of our next
major release (v6.2) to TestFlight. This release is focused on a major
upgrade to the wikitext editing experience. Key features include:
- wikitext syntax highlighting with accessible colors based on theme
(edit in night mode!) [currently based on the English configuration, but
supporting all CodeMirror configurations in upcoming builds. the final
version will also include the option to toggle highlighting and themes off]
- improved readability with improved fonts, spacing, wrapping and line
numbers
- a mobile-first toolbar for inserting formatting, basic links and
template syntax among other basic editor needs
- undo/redo
- long press menu on selected text to apply basic editing tools (make
highlighted text bold, for example)
- after publishing an edit, get returned to the changed section in the
article, rather than the beginning
This build is a bit rougher than we'd usually consider a beta, but there's
so much great functionality in there we wanted you to try it sooner than
later. You'll notice some tool bar buttons disabled for now (including a
planned "find in page" feature), and you will run into some bugs. Please
let us know about those bugs, but mostly we want to hear about the overall
experience and what needs we missed or what might need improvement. For
long time editors who are also app users we're particularly interested in
hearing from you.
We'll be running more formal user testing in January, but we're excited to
put this initial version in your hands to play with over the holidays.
*To sign up for the beta please tap here: *
https://testflight.apple.com/join/Z0AU0KXC
Happy holiday editing,
Josh Minor
PM, Wikipedia for iOS
Hi folks,
Hope you've all been well! :) We (the Commons app team) are applying for a
Project Grant[1] to fund the development of v3.0 of the Commons Android
app[2]. At the moment, we're approaching completion of our 2nd Individual
Engagement Grant, having implemented several major new features, e.g. a
revamped map of "nearby places that need photos" with direct uploads and
Wikidata integration, user talk notifications, browsing of other Commons
pictures with focus on featured images, and 2FA logins. We currently have
4000+ active installs, and 15,000+ distinct images uploaded via our app
have been used in Wikimedia articles. In the last 6 months alone, 21,241
files were uploaded via our app, and only 1738 (8.2%) of those files
required deletion. We are also proud to report that we have a vibrant,
diverse community of volunteers on our GitHub repository[3], and that we
have increased our global user coverage since our first grant.
It has been a rocky road this year, however. One of the major issues we
faced was that a large portion of our codebase is based on
sparsely-documented legacy code from the very first incarnation of the app
5 years ago (a long time in the Android development world), leading to
unpredictable behavior and bugs. We eventually found ourselves in a
position where new features built on top of legacy code were causing other
features to not work correctly, and even fixes to those problems sometimes
had side effects that caused other problems. (My sincerest apologies to
users for the inconveniences that they were caused!)
In view of that, our Project Grant proposal focuses on these areas:
- Increasing app stability and code quality: We plan to overhaul our legacy
backend to adhere to modern best practices, reduce complexity and
dependencies in our codebase, and introduce test-driven development for the
first time.
- Targeted acquisition of photos for places that need them: The "Nearby
places that need photos" feature has come a long way, but there is still
plenty of room for improvement. We plan to introduce new quality-of-life
features (e.g. by implementing filters and bookmarks) and fix a few
outstanding bugs to make it more user-friendly and convenient to use. We
will also complete the final link in the chain of collecting photos for
Wikipedia articles that lack them by prompting users to add their
recently-uploaded photo to the relevant Wikipedia article.
- Increasing user acquisition in the Global South: We plan to implement a
"limited connectivity" mode, allow pausing and resuming of uploads, and put
more time and effort into outreach and socializing the app, especially to
underrepresented communities.
- We also wish to continue to assist the Commons community to reduce
vandalism and improve usability of images uploaded. This will be done by
implementing selfie detection, and a "to-do" system that reminds users if
an image lacks a description/categories.
Your feedback is important to us! Please do take a look at our proposal[1],
and feel free to let us know what you think on the Discussion page, and/or
endorse the proposal if you see fit. If you would like to be part of the
project, new volunteers and additions to our diverse team are always
welcome - please visit our GitHub repository[3] and say "Hi". :)
Also, we have just released v2.9 for beta testing on the Play Store! \o/
v2.9 features a new main screen UI, a new upload UI with multiple uploads
enabled, and major bugfixes for image dates and the Nearby map default zoom
level. More information and screenshots can be found on our blog[4]. If you
would like to help test the new release, you can sign up for beta testing
here[5].
Finally, we want to thank everyone who has cheered us on and supported us
throughout the years. As a community-maintained app, we wouldn't be here
without you.
Best regards,
Josephine (User:Misaochan), Commons app project maintainer
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Commons_app/Commons_Android_…
[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.free.nrw.commons
[3] https://github.com/commons-app/apps-android-commons
[4] https://cookiesandcodeblog.wordpress.com/2018/11/28/version-2-9-beta/
[5] https://play.google.com/apps/testing/fr.free.nrw.commons