Hi Florian,
Thanks for the feedback!
Adding options for everything into the settings is a very slippery slope.
If you want examples of where it can end up, take a look at your settings
on Wikipedia! Tabs and tabs of options, many of which you don't even
realise exist. Ultimate customisation seems like a good thing on the
surface, but it creates tangled messes like that one. And it creates a
nightmare for customer support, too; the user has to recount all the
options they have turned on for you to reproduce their problems.
VisualEditor is a good example of this, as it frequently breaks due to user
CSS/JS that the user didn't even realise they had.
The other thing to consider about this is the development overhead. For
every option we have, we're adding an extra combination of settings that
we'd need to test and support. Those combinations grow exponentially with
each option that's added; so if you've got four settings then that's 16
combinations... and adding a fifth option increases that to 32! So we must
only add options for things that are truly the most important things, and
supporting suboptimal layouts with an option doesn't seem worth that
tradeoff to me.
Thanks,
Dan
On 12 March 2015 at 23:32, florian.schmidt.welzow(a)t-online.de <
florian.schmidt.welzow(a)t-online.de> wrote:
Hi Dan!
I'm fine with solutions, that try to save space and put as much meaningful
content as possible to the first view (available without scrolling) to the
app. I'm wondering, if this new feature will be behind a feature flag in
the settings of the app?
Like you said, stripping (or adding) content to or from a wikipedia
article is very controversial, so i think the user should have the
possibility to turn on (or off) the feature (i'm fine with default "on")
to
change the content in this way, or implement a setting to turn off _all_
changes to the content, so a user can see the plain wikipedia article
without any changes?
Kind reagrds,
Florian
Freundliche Grüße
Florian Schmidt
-----Original-Nachricht-----
Betreff: [WikimediaMobile] [Apps] Stripping content inside brackets from
the first sentence of articles
Datum: Fri, 13 Mar 2015 02:07:34 +0100
Von: Dan Garry <dgarry(a)wikimedia.org>
An: mobile-l <mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
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-e5dM5Tzt6p7w1mgNAd-Z3WE/edit#gid=0>
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
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--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation