Brion, Patrick and I chatted about this and we have an initial game plan for this. I'll publish the notes on wiki in a couple after we clean them up.
Rough notes are here : http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/MobileFrontendChanges
--tomasz
On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 4:20 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.varnum@gmail.comwrote:
The "this is what we have and it's better than nothing" has generally been my approach - and I've heard that from others as well. I haven't personally worked on any wikis in a few years where mobile use didn't come up (not much talk of it when I was using a Treo). However, I have no idea how widespread or common that may be. :)
Improvements to make this more usable by 3rd party wikis would be fantastic!
-greg aka varnent
On Jan 9, 2012, at 3:00 PM, Quim Gil wrote:
Hi Brion,
Short term:
I believe a lot of MediaWiki based sites would welcome a simple way to present their content in mobile interfaces. A combo of browser autodetection and mobile friendly skin would do the trick (this is how the Wordpress community is addressing the problem). Is Mobile Frontend extension is what we have here and now then this is better then nothing.
Longer term:
On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 11:03 AM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
- Does anybody actually want to use MobileFrontend to implement a
feature-phone gateway on other sites?
(...)
- Do people intend primarily to make the wiki's user interface more
friendly to modern smartphones, without caring about feature phones?
If so, then moving to the next generation
I'm not aware of the next generation plans you are referring to, but you also need to take into account the "next generation" context for smartphone vs feature-phone - which is precisely about the blurring of that division. Cheaper devices with internet capabilities, bigger/full screen and even touch are reaching more geographies. Pretty fast, for phones and tablets.
If you want to set a division then maybe you want to set it not between "dumb" and "smart" devices (meaning cheap and expensive in fact) but between passive and active users:
- A majority will want just to consume content, share it, rate it,
perhaps subscribe to it and leave a short comment - regardless of the "smartness" or price of their device.
- A very important minority will want to engage deeper and contribute,
also with their mobile devices on the go.
Can we assume that you need an expensive smartphone and Internet plan to be more active in MediaWiki sites? I don't think so, but we should go down to features to see exactly what type pf device requirements are we talking about.
-- Quim
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