Whilst in Indonesia I was subjected to some horrifically slow connections. Although I was only ever on WiFi, connection speeds were on par with 2G/Edge connection.

Whilst searching the web, I saw various results (including Tripadvisor and Wikipedia) labelled as being slow to load. When clicked I was redirected to a product called Google Web Light [1] that had a link to the original site and used 80% less data.

As a consumer, taking off my Wikimedia hat, I actually appreciated this experience for Wikipedia. When I clicked view original the process was so painfully slow I eventually found myself just living with it as it didn't devoid me of any activities as a reader (at the time connection was so slow editing just wasn't on my mind). For sites such as tripadvisor and hotels.com the experience was so bad, to look things up I ended up always switching to the original. This was more annoying as I was unable to find some global opt out for the entire site.

To crudely describe what the weblight experience does: 1) It loads just lead content 2) It strips lots of styles and some JS but not all JavaScript (for instance main menu works) 3) IT throws away features such as search, editing, talk pages, category 4) It bundles all links into the left menu accessible by the hamburger

I took some screenshots of the experience [2] - you can see the content is available but not well styled - it's how I'd imagine an AMP experience of Wikipedia to look like and you can play around with it yourself [3].

To summarise what this means to us: Google are making it possible for users with slow connections to get to our content ... thus various traffic never hits our servers. ... those users cannot edit. (although on plus side they do see our fundraising banners :-))

We can opt out of this experience via headers but right now I strongly believe we have to improve the speed of our offering.

I think this is in reach and will be a subject at the dev summit in various forms. The reading team has been experimenting in ways to optimise our page content by using Parsoid [3] specifically to explore how we can optimise views to HTML heavy pages such as Barack Obama. I'm looking forward to sharing results.

[1] https://googleweblight.com/?lite_url=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack Obama [2] http://imgur.com/a/dO4wt [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Reading/Web/Projects/Barack_Obam...