On 09/04/2015 03:12 PM, Brandon Harris wrote:
On Sep 2, 2015, at 3:53 PM, Toby Negrin
<tnegrin(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
1. 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