On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 7:26 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 21 August 2014 05:31, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
2014-08-21 9:30 GMT+03:00 Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com: It would *seem* that every user
converted to the mobile site is a step towards extinction of the wiki.
That is an excellent point Frederico. In addition to the inherent difficulties of editing on small screen, especially large articles and the "we know better approach" discussed in detail in the last weeks, there is also the problem of navigating between articles - the mobile website arbitrarily skips some elements visible on desktop, such as navboxes and significantly alter some infoboxes because "it doesn't look good". This makes it difficult to just browse the Wikipedia (thus finding mistakes that you might want to correct) and encourages searching for the information, which means going right on target
Hopefully the future announced at Wikimania, "no more mobile team, but mobile in every team" will solve some of these problems. It's just a matter of when will this future be.
Well, now. Here's a classic example of what is sometimes called a "first world problem". I know that, even on desktops, the more infoboxes and navboxes and succession boxes on an article (regardless of article length), the longer it takes to load. On a slower desktop collection, some really large, complex articles sometimes time out.
I went to look at some of those same articles using my smartphone with the "desktop" option turned on. Many of them timed out without fully loading; others took several minutes. There was a very, very noticeable difference in load time between the mobile view and the desktop view. And that was in North America with fast, very good connection on an up-to-date phone. Many of our editors and readers don't have this kind of infrastructure available to them.
So - we know there is a definite cost to having all these "navigation aids" in articles. We need to justify their use, instead of simply adding them by reflex. So here is where analytics teams can really be useful: tell us whether or not these navboxes are actually being used to go to other articles. If they're widely used to leap to the next article, then we need to find ways to make them more efficient so that they're suitable for mobile devices. If they're hardly ever being used, we need to reconsider their existence. Perhaps this becomes some sort of "meta data" tab from articles. The current format isn't sustainable, though.
If we're talking about navboxes, they are navigational and I agree the software should replace them with something else, or drop them entirely, if it helps rendering performance or the UI design.
I'd be interested to hear of examples of infoboxes that are being altered by the mobile view. I expect it being done for overly complex parts of some infoboxes.
While we're talking about the first world problem, I have first hand experience that the MediaViewer is a backwards step for people on dialup (e.g. people in regional Australia who rarely get the telco promised maximum of 28.8kbit/s) or on crappy mobile connections (which is most of Indonesia, fwiw, where many people use a _desktop_ or old laptop connected to the internet via 3G modem or their mobile phone).
Sure "they" can disable it with their preferences, but to get to that they need to download the MediaViewer software and *while* the image is downloading at a much higher res than it would have previously, figure out to scroll down, and press the 'Disable Media Viewer' link.
*But*, that only works on the normal website. On the mobile website, I cant figure out how to disable the Media Viewer. To check I wasnt missing something, I asked someone at the Wikimedia Indonesia office (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth/Beeyan) to try to disable it on his phone, and he couldnt work it out either.
Go to: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_Protection_Act_of_1970
Scroll down to the "Tennessee Walking Horse" photo and click on it. As far as I can see it has downloaded the 200+KB photo, and I may either close the MediaViewer or go to the page on Commons. There are no other options. We can't figure out how to disable this. Even after logging in on the mobile site, there is no preference to disable it in the Settings.
If you click the Details button to return to go to Commons, only a 70KB photo is shown, which is what used to occur.