Hey Pine.
Firstly, preamble. The goals of the Mobile Apps team are around increasing
the quality and quantity of content available on Wikipedia. In order to
quantitatively measure our success, we use the active editors metric, which
is "number of registered users that have made 5+ edits". This is for
practical reasons, as active editors is an organisation-wide and is useful
a quantitative measure in spite of its weakness. Our goal is to increase
the number of active editors!
So, responses in-line!
On 28 July 2014 14:40, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
* Full text search functionality
We're thinking about getting a minimal form of this in like we have in
Mobile Web. But it'll require a bit more thought before we can get started
as we have to weight it against our other goals that more directly increase
active editors.
That said, some of our Android engineers are working on full-page search
functionality in their 20% time. For context, "20% time" is a thing that we
stick to loosely that says that engineers are free to work on whatever
interests them for 20% of their time, because sometimes really awesome
things come out of really random ideas.
* Compatibility with Signpost front page template
I'm unsure what you mean by this. Can you
explain?
* Support interwiki linking such as to Meta
I'm unsure what you mean by this too. I know
what interwiki links are, but
you can easily add them using wikitext editing and then access them using
the button in the overflow menu.
* Condense the options panels from the left and right hamburger icons to a
> single icon
This request is actually contrary to our style
guidelines on these two
menus. For the most part, application-level settings are contained in the
hamburger menu and page-level settings are contained in the overflow menu.
The exception is the font and theme selector, with the rationale that you
need to test it on the page that you're on before you finalise the settings.
* More emphasis on encouraging people to edit
This is really important to us. Right now
we're working on a special screen
to help people that tap edit for the first time. And later we plan to add
information to the onboarding screen to encourage people to edit. We need
to be deliberate about this though, so that we're sure that we don't annoy
our substantial reader base.
* VisualEditor fuctionality
For purely practical reasons this is not going
to be done any time soon.
For reasons I'll admit I don't fully understand yet, this is really
*really* complex
and could well represent over a year's worth of work for several full-time
engineers. :-(
Thank you very much for your feedback. :-)
Dan
--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation