I hate to dissent, but I don't think a separate app is the way to go at this time for a few reasons.
First, many of the types of contributions to wikidata that we've talked about game-ifying are article specific. ie, "have user read some portion of an article and summarize what it's about in 5 words or less", etc.
This would mean we'd need search and browse etc, and my gut tells me a variety of other context and interactions the existing app provides would need to be recreated.
If the existing app could launch the game app, that could be one way to provide context, but from a UX perspective, we would otherwise be limiting ourselves to tasks that didn't require heavy back-and-forth comparisons and the transition between apps, at least on iOS, is super annoying (the way Facebook swaps out to Messenger annoys the hell out of me).
I also think, at this time, our limited resources are better spent carefully crafting one or two gamed interactions which we can carefully insert into the existing app rather than having to solve the inevitable wider set of challenges a new app would present.
The existing app also has a flood of users based on name recognition alone. Although I suppose we could call it "Wikipedia Games"...
tl:dr, game-ify yes, other app no/not now
On Aug 9, 2014, at 17:37, mobile-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
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Today's Topics:
- Creating a shell app to house Wikidata games (Tomasz Finc)
- Re: Creating a shell app to house Wikidata games (May Tee-Galloway)
- Re: Creating a shell app to house Wikidata games (Dmitry Brant)
- Re: Creating a shell app to house Wikidata games (Moiz Syed)
- Re: Creating a shell app to house Wikidata games (Yuvi Panda)
- Re: Creating a shell app to house Wikidata games (Bernd Sitzmann)
Message: 1 Date: Sat, 9 Aug 2014 13:35:41 +0100 From: Tomasz Finc tfinc@wikimedia.org To: mobile-l mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [WikimediaMobile] Creating a shell app to house Wikidata games Message-ID: CAMxhqbdO_ARWufx-LTSruXaDAsjmeOvcrc3MeZdq7dsQiX1acA@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
It's been amazing to see the interest in WikiData games here at Wikimania and i've been approached by a number of people who've wanted to create them. From label creation to data validation there have been many ideas of how to engage users in new and creative ways.
I'm curious to hear from users on this list and beyond about interest in a WikiData games app that would facilitate simple and quick contributions.
The idea would be that the app would act as a simple frontend shell that would allow anyone to interact with WikiData games to create, curate, and validate content. Putting aside the difficulties of dynamic custom user content with the app I'm curious about the interest in this.
I know that that mobile web team is already planning a handful of experiments with this and I'm eager to see if some of you would frequent an app that collected these and empowered users to contribute in ways that doesn't exist yet.
Do let know
--tomasz
Message: 2 Date: Sat, 9 Aug 2014 15:11:04 +0100 From: May Tee-Galloway mgalloway@wikimedia.org To: Tomasz Finc tfinc@wikimedia.org Cc: mobile-l mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [WikimediaMobile] Creating a shell app to house Wikidata games Message-ID: CAN4BDz4AE=+XCM=6+OY6_1h5sDLbjuzg7d5U72Hjn11cXY1Fug@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
You got a designer here!
On Sat, Aug 9, 2014 at 1:35 PM, Tomasz Finc tfinc@wikimedia.org wrote:
It's been amazing to see the interest in WikiData games here at Wikimania and i've been approached by a number of people who've wanted to create them. From label creation to data validation there have been many ideas of how to engage users in new and creative ways.
I'm curious to hear from users on this list and beyond about interest in a WikiData games app that would facilitate simple and quick contributions.
The idea would be that the app would act as a simple frontend shell that would allow anyone to interact with WikiData games to create, curate, and validate content. Putting aside the difficulties of dynamic custom user content with the app I'm curious about the interest in this.
I know that that mobile web team is already planning a handful of experiments with this and I'm eager to see if some of you would frequent an app that collected these and empowered users to contribute in ways that doesn't exist yet.
Do let know
--tomasz
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
On 10 August 2014 08:34, Monte Hurd mhurd@wikimedia.org wrote:
The existing app also has a flood of users based on name recognition alone. Although I suppose we could call it "Wikipedia Games"...
That's an idea worth exploring. Having a "Games" button in the left nav, that when tapped launches the "Wikipedia Games" app which has a collection of different games you can play. We know we have tons of people interacting with the left nav, so there's no worries about discoverability. The app would start a shell which contains many separate submodules, each of them a game developed by a different group. On the user-facing end, it'd be a big list of games that people could play to help Wikipedia! Our work would be to create this shell. Then we can even make our own games to plug in to it!
There are benefits of this:
- There will be less concerns about the games "bloating" the app. The main app will continue to be lean and lightweight. - It's a great framework for volunteers to build out games to be included in the official games app. - As we would have +2 in the repo for the app, we would still have quality control of what goes in the app.
This does not preclude us from incorporating one or two games, like the Wikidata label thing that Mobile Web is doing, into the main app.
The question is, what is required from us to make this happen? I think it would be worth us chatting briefly when we're all back from Wikimania to define the minimal viable product for this, to assess how achievable it is for us to work on it, and see where it fits into our priorities.
Dan
On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 4:24 AM, Dan Garry dgarry@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 10 August 2014 08:34, Monte Hurd mhurd@wikimedia.org wrote:
The existing app also has a flood of users based on name recognition alone. Although I suppose we could call it "Wikipedia Games"...
That's an idea worth exploring. Having a "Games" button in the left nav, that when tapped launches the "Wikipedia Games" app which has a collection of different games you can play. We know we have tons of people interacting with the left nav, so there's no worries about discoverability. The app would start a shell which contains many separate submodules, each of them a game developed by a different group. On the user-facing end, it'd be a big list of games that people could play to help Wikipedia! Our work would be to create this shell. Then we can even make our own games to plug in to it!
There are benefits of this:
- There will be less concerns about the games "bloating" the app. The
main app will continue to be lean and lightweight.
- It's a great framework for volunteers to build out games to be
included in the official games app.
- As we would have +2 in the repo for the app, we would still have
quality control of what goes in the app.
This does not preclude us from incorporating one or two games, like the Wikidata label thing that Mobile Web is doing, into the main app.
The question is, what is required from us to make this happen? I think it would be worth us chatting briefly when we're all back from Wikimania to define the minimal viable product for this, to assess how achievable it is for us to work on it, and see where it fits into our priorities.
I agree with Monte that, while these are cool ideas to explore in the future, now might not be the time to dive too deeply into them.
If I understand the original proposal correctly, the idea was to add a launch-point somewhere in the Wikipedia app that would simply take you to the mobile view of Magnus's games (and potentially any new volunteer-created games that were developed in the future) – however, it's important to remember that the currently existing Wikidata games aren't formatted for mobile and may not necessarily make sense in the mobile context. At minimum, an MVP would need some design work to ensure the UX of the games isn't broken, and some selection and special-casing of games that are appropriate for mobile users.
And that's just the Product/Design piece – in addition to implementing visual design/UI improvements, I imagine there would also be some technical hurdles like doing a spike around Magnus's codebase to ensure we didn't melt a game by sending (potentially) hundreds of thousands of people into it all at once; finding a way to hook into CentralAuth/OAuth to ensure these edits are attributed to logged-in users; etc. If you factor in some analytics to determine how people are making it through the funnel, the inevitable round of design and UX refinements, potentially figuring out how to throttle the feature to avoid too many bad edits or edit conflicts... you're talking potentially a quarter's worth of work.
But the main concern for me isn't so much the workload this would introduce as the fact that this workload would be done without the initial validation of whether our app audience (still primarily readers, but also probably a lot of editors who don't necessarily know that much about Wikidata) would even be interested in/understand these games. Our initial user testing of the first WikiTinder prototype showed that we'll need to think hard about how to frame this feature to users in a way that a) they understand, and b) provides them with sustained value, that proverbial "a-ha!" moment – because it's pretty clear from the reactions we got that just throwing people at the experience only works for the tiny subset of users who already know what they're doing and is potentially very off-putting/scary to those who don't.
I think that through WikiTinder work over the coming months, the Mobile Web team will have a much clearer idea of whether and how this can be done, and this knowledge can help guide how we think of the Wikidata games app experience if/when we choose to tackle it.
My two cents - Games should be integrated. I don't endorse the idea of having to go a place and create an experience so disconnected that many readers may never find it. Discovering actions in the process of reading and exploring Wikipedia is what creates serendipity.
---- Vibha Bamba Senior Designer | WMF Design
On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Maryana Pinchuk mpinchuk@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 4:24 AM, Dan Garry dgarry@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 10 August 2014 08:34, Monte Hurd mhurd@wikimedia.org wrote:
The existing app also has a flood of users based on name recognition alone. Although I suppose we could call it "Wikipedia Games"...
That's an idea worth exploring. Having a "Games" button in the left nav, that when tapped launches the "Wikipedia Games" app which has a collection of different games you can play. We know we have tons of people interacting with the left nav, so there's no worries about discoverability. The app would start a shell which contains many separate submodules, each of them a game developed by a different group. On the user-facing end, it'd be a big list of games that people could play to help Wikipedia! Our work would be to create this shell. Then we can even make our own games to plug in to it!
There are benefits of this:
- There will be less concerns about the games "bloating" the app. The
main app will continue to be lean and lightweight.
- It's a great framework for volunteers to build out games to be
included in the official games app.
- As we would have +2 in the repo for the app, we would still have
quality control of what goes in the app.
This does not preclude us from incorporating one or two games, like the Wikidata label thing that Mobile Web is doing, into the main app.
The question is, what is required from us to make this happen? I think it would be worth us chatting briefly when we're all back from Wikimania to define the minimal viable product for this, to assess how achievable it is for us to work on it, and see where it fits into our priorities.
I agree with Monte that, while these are cool ideas to explore in the future, now might not be the time to dive too deeply into them.
If I understand the original proposal correctly, the idea was to add a launch-point somewhere in the Wikipedia app that would simply take you to the mobile view of Magnus's games (and potentially any new volunteer-created games that were developed in the future) – however, it's important to remember that the currently existing Wikidata games aren't formatted for mobile and may not necessarily make sense in the mobile context. At minimum, an MVP would need some design work to ensure the UX of the games isn't broken, and some selection and special-casing of games that are appropriate for mobile users.
And that's just the Product/Design piece – in addition to implementing visual design/UI improvements, I imagine there would also be some technical hurdles like doing a spike around Magnus's codebase to ensure we didn't melt a game by sending (potentially) hundreds of thousands of people into it all at once; finding a way to hook into CentralAuth/OAuth to ensure these edits are attributed to logged-in users; etc. If you factor in some analytics to determine how people are making it through the funnel, the inevitable round of design and UX refinements, potentially figuring out how to throttle the feature to avoid too many bad edits or edit conflicts... you're talking potentially a quarter's worth of work.
But the main concern for me isn't so much the workload this would introduce as the fact that this workload would be done without the initial validation of whether our app audience (still primarily readers, but also probably a lot of editors who don't necessarily know that much about Wikidata) would even be interested in/understand these games. Our initial user testing of the first WikiTinder prototype showed that we'll need to think hard about how to frame this feature to users in a way that a) they understand, and b) provides them with sustained value, that proverbial "a-ha!" moment – because it's pretty clear from the reactions we got that just throwing people at the experience only works for the tiny subset of users who already know what they're doing and is potentially very off-putting/scary to those who don't.
I think that through WikiTinder work over the coming months, the Mobile Web team will have a much clearer idea of whether and how this can be done, and this knowledge can help guide how we think of the Wikidata games app experience if/when we choose to tackle it.
-- Maryana Pinchuk Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation wikimediafoundation.org
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
yup I'd been meaning to chip in but I echo everything Monte says. On 13 Aug 2014 11:57, "Vibha Bamba" vbamba@wikimedia.org wrote:
My two cents - Games should be integrated. I don't endorse the idea of having to go a place and create an experience so disconnected that many readers may never find it. Discovering actions in the process of reading and exploring Wikipedia is what creates serendipity.
Vibha Bamba Senior Designer | WMF Design
On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Maryana Pinchuk mpinchuk@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 4:24 AM, Dan Garry dgarry@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 10 August 2014 08:34, Monte Hurd mhurd@wikimedia.org wrote:
The existing app also has a flood of users based on name recognition alone. Although I suppose we could call it "Wikipedia Games"...
That's an idea worth exploring. Having a "Games" button in the left nav, that when tapped launches the "Wikipedia Games" app which has a collection of different games you can play. We know we have tons of people interacting with the left nav, so there's no worries about discoverability. The app would start a shell which contains many separate submodules, each of them a game developed by a different group. On the user-facing end, it'd be a big list of games that people could play to help Wikipedia! Our work would be to create this shell. Then we can even make our own games to plug in to it!
There are benefits of this:
- There will be less concerns about the games "bloating" the app.
The main app will continue to be lean and lightweight.
- It's a great framework for volunteers to build out games to be
included in the official games app.
- As we would have +2 in the repo for the app, we would still have
quality control of what goes in the app.
This does not preclude us from incorporating one or two games, like the Wikidata label thing that Mobile Web is doing, into the main app.
The question is, what is required from us to make this happen? I think it would be worth us chatting briefly when we're all back from Wikimania to define the minimal viable product for this, to assess how achievable it is for us to work on it, and see where it fits into our priorities.
I agree with Monte that, while these are cool ideas to explore in the future, now might not be the time to dive too deeply into them.
If I understand the original proposal correctly, the idea was to add a launch-point somewhere in the Wikipedia app that would simply take you to the mobile view of Magnus's games (and potentially any new volunteer-created games that were developed in the future) – however, it's important to remember that the currently existing Wikidata games aren't formatted for mobile and may not necessarily make sense in the mobile context. At minimum, an MVP would need some design work to ensure the UX of the games isn't broken, and some selection and special-casing of games that are appropriate for mobile users.
And that's just the Product/Design piece – in addition to implementing visual design/UI improvements, I imagine there would also be some technical hurdles like doing a spike around Magnus's codebase to ensure we didn't melt a game by sending (potentially) hundreds of thousands of people into it all at once; finding a way to hook into CentralAuth/OAuth to ensure these edits are attributed to logged-in users; etc. If you factor in some analytics to determine how people are making it through the funnel, the inevitable round of design and UX refinements, potentially figuring out how to throttle the feature to avoid too many bad edits or edit conflicts... you're talking potentially a quarter's worth of work.
But the main concern for me isn't so much the workload this would introduce as the fact that this workload would be done without the initial validation of whether our app audience (still primarily readers, but also probably a lot of editors who don't necessarily know that much about Wikidata) would even be interested in/understand these games. Our initial user testing of the first WikiTinder prototype showed that we'll need to think hard about how to frame this feature to users in a way that a) they understand, and b) provides them with sustained value, that proverbial "a-ha!" moment – because it's pretty clear from the reactions we got that just throwing people at the experience only works for the tiny subset of users who already know what they're doing and is potentially very off-putting/scary to those who don't.
I think that through WikiTinder work over the coming months, the Mobile Web team will have a much clearer idea of whether and how this can be done, and this knowledge can help guide how we think of the Wikidata games app experience if/when we choose to tackle it.
-- Maryana Pinchuk Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation wikimediafoundation.org
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Maryana Pinchuk mpinchuk@wikimedia.org wrote:
And that's just the Product/Design piece – in addition to implementing visual design/UI improvements, I imagine there would also be some technical hurdles like doing a spike around Magnus's codebase to ensure we didn't melt a game by sending (potentially) hundreds of thousands of people into it all at once; finding a way to hook into CentralAuth/OAuth to ensure these edits are attributed to logged-in users; etc.
I hate to chime in with a "me too" but a reminder that legal also has some concerns around the TOU/CC here as well- how are they presented? when are they agreed to? if we build a standard "shell" that many people can use/experiment with, how do we make sure the fun/new/cool stuff maintains the same licensing integrity people expect from the main website/existing apps?
Nothing we can't resolve (and hopefully nothing we can't resolve quickly!) but please do keep in mind as people are experimenting and thinking about things.
Luis "wet blanket" Villa