On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 8:47 AM, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
This would be best answered by Brandon.From a personal point of view if the mobile site still looks like a mobile site in a desktop browser at the start of next year I will be somewhat disappointed with myself.
+1
I personally believe that mobile is the likely method for accelerating athenas development as there are less blockers to do that.
We should be looking at Athena (and other projects like it) as guidance for how were going to approach contribution projects on mobile. Our focus for the next year is to not just grow the readership base but to also grow the contributor base. We've never had as many eyes on Wikipedia as before who can't contribute. Mobile users can't be second class citizens within the Wikimedia projects. We have to build all new pipelines on mobile devices to make this happen. These contributor methods may look drastically different then their desktop counterparts.
Responsive design is an interesting technique for layout but it breaks down for functionality. A mobile phone, a tablet, and a desktop/laptop are used very differently. Mimicking the exact same functionality means your failing to understand what's best for each device.
A lot of the existing bottle neck from my perspective is due to a lack of volunteer developers in the many mobile projects which slows important things like this down. Aside from the new design we are also planning some cool stuff for Wiki loves monuments with image uploading via mobile phones to commons. Poke me off list if you are keen to give time/expertise to help accelerate important initiatives like this.
I'm going to re-iterate what Jon said here. We have numerous projects going on now and we've been actively mailing, blogging, and tweeting to get new testers/developers/etc. Were always eager to get more people involved. If you need to catch up with what were working on just check the mobile projects pages.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile
--tomasz