Small (native) apps can do Wikimedia work quite effectively using the api
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John Vandenberg.
sent from Galaxy Note
On Dec 12, 2012 7:04 AM, "MZMcBride" <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
Over on the mobile team we've been chatting
for a while about the various
trade-offs in native vs HTML-based (PhoneGap/Cordova) development.
[...]
iOS and Android remain our top-tier mobile platforms, and we know we can
do
better on them than we do so far...
Any thoughts? Wildly in favor or against?
It's unclear from your e-mail what the goal of mobile interaction (for lack
of a better term) is. Are you trying to build editing features? File upload
features? Or do you want to just have a decent reader? This seems like a
key
component to any discussion of the future of mobile development.
Looking at the big picture, I don't think we'll ever see widespread editing
from mobile devices. The user experience is simply too awful. The best I
think most people are hoping for is the ability to easily fix a typo,
maybe,
but even then you have to assess costs vs. benefit. That is, is it really
worth paying two or three full-time employees so that someone can easily
change "Barrack" to "Barack" from his or her iPhone? Probably not.
Perhaps mobile uploading could use better native support, but again, is the
cost worth it? Does Commons need more low-quality photos? And even as phone
cameras get better, do those photos need to be _instantly_ uploaded to the
site? There's something to be said for waiting until you get home to upload
photos, especially given how cumbersome the photo upload process is
(copyright, permissions, categorization, etc.). And this all side-steps the
question of whether there are better organizations equipped at handling
photos (such as Flickr or whatever).
That leaves reading. If a relatively recent browser can't read Wikimedia
wikis without performance issues, I think that indicates a problem with
Wikimedia wikis (way too much JavaScript, images are too large, etc.).
Mobile browsers are fairly robust (vastly more robust compared to what they
used to be), so I'm not sure why having a Wikipedia reader is valuable or
why it's worth investing finite resources in. Occasionally I'll hear "but I
want to have a favorite pages feature or I want to support offline
reading,"
but the phone's OS should be able to handle most of this from the built-in
Web browser. Or not, but I think if a phone is incapable of a feature such
as "e-mail this Web page (article) to a friend," it's not an important
enough feature to devote resources to.
Wikimedia wikis have a lot of bugs and the Wikimedia Foundation has finite
resources. I personally only use the "Messages" and "Music" apps on
my
phone, so I'm not the best person to make the argument for additional
mobile
development, but when I look at how terrible the user experience continues
to be for desktop users, it becomes difficult for me to understand why the
Wikimedia Foundation would delve into the world of mobile (apart from
initiatives such as Wikipedia Zero). What benefit to the creation or
dissemination of free educational content are we seeing (or hoping to see)
from native apps?
MZMcBride
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