Hi, For those of you following who I haven't worked with before, I am the lead product manager for the reading team.
I think James is right that the content is a primary barrier and its an issue we are exploring across both reading and editing. For what its worth, this applies not just to the web but to all non-desktop usage, including apps and 3rd party developers. I believe our 3rd meeting on the topic is tomorrow morning and Moushira just posted this invitation to participate more broadly on wiki: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Mobile_Friendly_Content.
Whether we end up getting rid of the mobile site or follow another path towards unity is an open question.
Another big barrier to having a single site and one we have to address regardless, is how we add advanced tools to mobile without crushing the average user. Over the years the desktop site has accumulated many useful features/tools and this is reflected in the various rich options on the desktop site. Mobile screen real estate, however, is much more limited and the affordances are quite different. So far, we have focused on a simple experience because we know we can't mush the entire left-hand navigation field into the mobile menu or provide the same list of 40+ settings that are on desktop. This has provided us with a remarkable experiment in reading that at least anecdotally suggests most readers prefer a simpler experience.
However, it does not yet work well for editors and certainly not for more advanced contributions. So, we need to figure out how we can maintain the pathway from reader --> contributor on mobile without generating a user experience nightmare. One of our big challenges in creating a unified experience is figuring out how we move someone from a basic reading view to a first-time editor view, to a power-user-genius view in a way that entices a potential contributor and optimizes the experience for everyone else. There are multiple options on the table here and I think it's going to be a long conversation ;)
Thanks,
J
On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 2:25 PM, James Forrester jforrester@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 11 May 2016 at 14:20, Michael Peel email@mikepeel.net wrote:
I'm hoping that having a responsive skin for the webpages isn't too far off, though?
Reading can answer that better than I; however, making the skin itself is only part of the issue – you also would want to scrap m.wikimedia.org *etc. *Right now, the mobile sites have to make massive changes to the content to make it fit on a mobile screen (and even then can't fix some things, like tables). Giving mobile users a responsive skin whilst the contents weren't appropriate wouldn't make anyone happy. Until the contents of at least most the millions of pages of Wikimedia wikis' projects are mobile-safe, we can't reasonably get rid of the mobile "site".
J.
James D. Forrester Lead Product Manager, Editing Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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