Hello all,
For the last few months, the Wikidata team has been working on improving the termbox interface on mobile. The termbox is this area on Items where you can read or edit labels, descriptions and aliases in various languages. Our goal is to provide a nicer experience while reading and editing this area from the mobile web pages.
Thanks to the combined work of various teams at WMDE and WMF, to our UX researchers and the editors who gave feedback on the prototypes, the first version of the feature is now deployed on wikidata.org. *What is included in this new termbox interface?*
- You can browse labels, descriptions and aliases on a new and more mobile-friendly interface, for all existing languages - You can edit existing labels, descriptions and aliases directly from the interface of the Item - The behaviour of the mobile termbox is very similar to the current termbox on desktop: preferred languages are sorted based on the Universal Language Selector extension, that is taking information from your Babel userbox (if you’re logged in) - The edits made through the interface will have the “mobile edit” tag, so you can track them and watch out for vandalism
*What is not included yet, but may be in the future?*
- A dedicated termbox-mobile tag in the edit summary, to track edits more precisely - Adding labels, descriptions or aliases in languages that don’t contain anything for now (we’re working on it, in the meantime, you can do it with Special:SetLabelDescriptionAliases) - Various interface enhancements (floating buttons, colors, icons, text labels)
*What was not included in the scope of this project*
- Ability to edit something else than the Item termbox (eg. statements, Lexemes, other entity types) - Any change on the desktop interface
*How can you test it and give feedback?*
The feature is now live on wikidata.org, which means you can access any Item from a mobile device and check it out. You can also see it from desktop by clicking on the "mobile view" link at the very bottom of a page, or adding &mobileaction=toggle_view_mobile at the end of the URL. *Example: Q666 https://m.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q666&mobileaction=toggle_view_mobile*
Please note that some pages are cached - if you don’t see the new termbox appearing on an Item, it will appear next time that someone edits this item.
If you have any suggestions or would like to share feedback with us, you can write on the talk page of the termbox project https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:Development/Termbox.
If you encounter any bug or serious technical issues, you can also create a task on Phabricator, using the tag Wikidata-Termbox https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/3620.
Cheers,