Brion Vibber wrote:
On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 3:39 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Tomasz Finc wrote:
We're moving into our first testing stage for the new mobile extension and we'd love your help. You can find all the details on todays blog post at http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/06/10/testing-mobile-prototype/
Forgive me, but I don't understand the purpose of a prototype wiki that's not really a prototype: there are no images or templates. The home page (http://nomad.tesla.usability.wikimedia.org/index.php/Main_Page) seems to indicate that this is expected, but unless the goal is to have users test how well red links render on their phone, I'm not sure what testing can be done currently. Are the images and templates going to be imported?
There's way more than red links there: there's paragraph on paragraph of text, with templates, images, category links, interlanguage links, references, etc. Some bits are indeed missing and ought to be cleaned up for further testing though -- and your feedback about that is valuable to the people setting up the tests.
Just don't confuse giving feedback with blasting people into oblivion for not being perfect on the first round.
I was asking if was a "Friday at five" issue or if it was intended. The Main Page seems to indicate that it's intended behavior, which doesn't make any sense. If you're calling on end users to participate in testing (through the Wikimedia blog), yes, the prototypes should be in reasonably working order first. Otherwise, put off the announcement until they are. I'm not trying to blast anyone anywhere, I just don't understand why you'd announce to the world that testing is ready when it isn't.
I looked a bit closer at the prototype and can't really figure out which templates were and weren't imported. It also seems that importing doesn't update certain tables (e.g., Special:ListFiles is empty), which sucks. You must limit variables when testing, otherwise you'll end up with half the feedback being "the page didn't render properly" when it was simply a lot of known missing content.
[snip] That's client-side resizing, which is painful enough on a full web browser, much less a mobile device. The wikicode specifies "|thumb|", which should resize the image server-side, surely. I'm not sure what's going on there.
Awesome -- you found a bug! Apparently the system does work. :)
Well, no, the system doesn't work. That would be the bug. Most users are going to report "site slow as shit" or simply get frustrated and leave because they're downloading megabytes of images unknowingly. I think it's great to solicit user feedback on the mobile project, but I think if it's a muddled mess, the signal (actual problems in the extension) is going to be drowned out by the noise (endless reports of brokenness in the prototypes).
Come help test, develop, or just ask about our mobile efforts on irc freednode #wikimedia-mobile.
I don't think yet another IRC channel is a good idea. Surely this could go in #wikimedia-dev or #mediawiki.
That's a pre-existing channel that's been in use for a couple years.
Pre-existing in the sense that people have joined it before, I guess. It's not registered and I don't see why it's needed, particularly when #wikimedia-dev was supposed to encompass these types of Wikimedia-led projects. But okay.
MZMcBride