Platonides wrote:
On 12/12/12 01:04, MZMcBride wrote:
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.
Then maybe the only feature needed by the mobile apps is a "highlight article content" and "email me a bookmark to this when I'm on desktop".
Maybe. But if you have an entire mobile team, they're going to quickly run out of things to do.
David Gerard wrote:
OTOH, see recent coverage of Wikipedia in Africa, where it's basically going to be on phones. Cheap shitty smartphones. That the kids are *desperate* to get Wikipedia on. Do we want to make those readers into editors? It'd be nice.
Sure, it's difficult to argue against turning readers into editors. I'm asking if the described mobile-related efforts (i.e., going native) will get us any closer to our broader goals (creating and disseminating free educational content). And if so, how?
As I hinted in my previous post, I make a distinction between mobile app/site development work and initiatives such as Wikipedia Zero (which is probably what the kids in Africa are reading Wikipedia via). I think it makes sense to focus effort and energy on making Wikimedia wikis (not just Wikipedia!) available in more places. I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to support editing and other interaction components on mobile devices. But, again, there's a lot of vagueness and ambiguity in this discussion, particularly with regard to what the _goals_ of mobile interaction actually are. Without having defined, measurable goals, it's almost impossible to make an informed decision here, in my opinion.
David Gerard wrote:
MZMcBride wrote:
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).
This is a version of the general argument against participation. There are reasons it's not favoured.
Oh come on now, that's not really fair. I'm not arguing against participation, I'm arguing against shitty photos. I was almost completely uninvolved, but I seem to remember much ado earlier this year about Wiki Loves Monuments and mobile support (it even had its own mobile app, I guess?). But looking at all of the WLM winners (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2012_winners), were any of them taken on mobile devices? A quick sampling seems to suggest that all of the good photos came from Nikon or Sony cameras. That isn't to say that mobile uploads ("muploads") aren't ever going to be valuable to Wikimedia wikis, but it does raise the legitimate question of whether it's a good use of finite resources to support such projects. What is the value?
MZMcBride