On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 9:13 PM, Corey Floyd cfloyd@wikimedia.org wrote:
Definitely interesting… not too surprising that there has been a bump in mobile reading over that past few years - seeing as everyone's phone screens are twice as big as they were in 2012. Anecdotally, I am more likely to read on my phone now than I was a few years ago (I always used to reach for my iPad before I had an iPhone 6).
When reviewing these stats, we should keep in mind the primary use case of Wikipedia - a reference. While it is true that some will read significant portions of a book or a blog posts on their phones, most people aren't looking to read a Wikipedia article from top-to-bottom. Some will read a section or 2, while many others will only need to ready the first paragraph to get the answer that they need.
I definitely think we need to test this assumption. I wonder if this is something the QuickSurvey could be used to measure e.g. a simple question "What are you here for?" (although results might get skewed by quick lookups having no time to do a survey). I'm not sure it is. Personally I read much more than the lead section (I tend to use Google quick facts for those quick lookups).
Thoughts welcomed on how we could work this out.
So even as the number of "long form readers" increases on mobile, that might not directly translate into more "full article Wikipedia readers" on mobile.
I definitely believe we should continue improving our mobile reading experience - it will only become more important as these numbers increase, however we shouldn't draw to many conclusions from this article as the content being discussed is quite different.
On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 12:31 PM, Tilman Bayer tbayer@wikimedia.org wrote:
Forwarding to the public list too.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Tilman Bayer tbayer@wikimedia.org Date: Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 9:40 PM Subject: Interesting WSJ article: "The Rise of Phone Reading" To: Internal communication for WMF Reading team reading-wmf@lists.wikimedia.org
Some food for thought - it's probably not entirely surprising in 2015, but this article collects a lot of information showing that the assumption "few people want to read long texts on a phone" is too simplistic: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rise-of-phone-reading-1439398395
TLDR from our perspective: Smartphones are becoming a major venue for reading ebooks, ie. really long-form texts, more than was predicted a few years ago. ("In a Nielsen survey of 2,000 people this past December, about 54% of e-book buyers said they used smartphones to read their books at least some of the time. That’s up from 24% in 2012.") One reason is convenience - “The best device to read on is the one you have with you"/"Most people who read on their phones toggle back and forth between devices, using whichever is closest at hand when opportunity strikes". Another is that screen sizes are getting bigger. Also has some bits about how book publishers react to this, which may of course be less applicable to us.
[...]
Tilman Bayer Senior Analyst Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
-- Corey Floyd Software Engineer Mobile Apps / iOS Wikimedia Foundation
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l