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