On 09/04/2015 03:12 PM, Brandon Harris wrote:
On Sep 2, 2015, at 3:53 PM, Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org wrote:
- We're moving people from an open platform to a closed platform:
I think this is an oversimplification of the situation -- as has been noted before, the android app is 100% open source and while the data is not, in my opinion, comprehensive, it's inarguable that a large percentage of mobile traffic on the internet is from apps. It's not possible to fulfill our mission[4] if Wikipedia and sister project content is not available in widely used channels.
I'm not sure this makes a lot of sense. The widest, most-open content channel that the projects have is through the web interfaces: all phones, all devices, all computers can access the same content in the same manner. That is to say: 100% of our readers have the ability to use the web versions (either desktop or mobile web) where as only a subset can use the Android app, which is a different subset that can use iOS. (They also end up having fragmented experiences, which is sub-optimal.)
Some fraction of our users have the ability to go a library and read Wikipedia there. That doesn't mean publishing Wikipedia in library kiosk form would fulfill their needs. A lot of them don't *actually* go to libraries, even though they could. Analogously, a lot of people prefer apps to web.
We need to share content in ways our readers and editors want, not in the ways we prefer they do it.
(There is also a huge role for reusers sharing our content in other interesting ways, but that's another matter).
So it seems to me that the apps are not required to fulfill the mission. They feel like distractions, and - quite possibly - negatives to the mission (in that we can't convert Readers into Editors through the app).
Why not? The app already supports editing. True, you can't do every possible kind of edit/operation, but people don't do all of those as early editors anyway. It certainly provides a way to become an editor, and get editing work done.
Matt Flaschen