(moving to mobile-l)
Thanks Vibha, this is really informative.
It's very clear that our first sentences really suck for supporting quick
lookup, primarily because their information hierarchy is all wrong. That
said, it's important to remember that we now have Wikidata descriptions
displayed in the apps for this exact reason: to let people find out quickly
and easily what something is.
So, although I agree that our first sentences are suboptimal, it's
important to put the problem in context and remember that users do have
Wikidata descriptions now to satisfy this use case. It's not like we're
totally failing them, we could just be doing a bit better.
Rather than piling on hacks by trying to scrape the content in the first
sentence and reorganise it (which causes information loss, and is extremely
fragile from a technological perspective), the long term solution is, at
least to me, to invest in is getting our engaged readers to write clear,
coherent Wikidata descriptions. These can then be used across all platforms
to support that workflow.
Of course, there may be room for some quick wins that we can put in place
while we figure out truly compelling UX for getting readers to submit
descriptions. We can explore those quick wins in our brainstorming session
on Monday. But we must remember that these will only be short-term, hacky
solutions to the problem, and that we need to address this problem at the
source in order to be really successful at it.
Thanks!
Dan
On 6 March 2015 at 16:13, Jon Robson <jrobson(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Any reason this is on mobile-tech and not mobile-l
(I'd love to hear from
people like Amir on this subject)? It would be good to flag this problem to
a wider audience and part of our problem with most mobile issues is people
just are not aware of this sort of thing. Many probably haven't even heard
of the hemingway app...
It would be interesting to see how a wikidata generated first sentence
would score with the same app.
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 3:54 PM, Vibha Bamba <vbamba(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi Folks,
Kaity and I used the Hemingway app <http://www.hemingwayapp.com/> to
analyze the readability of our first sentence, using a few articles. They
all scored poorly, an ideal grade level of 10 is recommended for clear bold
writing.
This difficult problem arises from the first sentence containing one or
more of the following:
- IPA Keys
- Birth/ death dates
- Other Names/ AKA's
- Help/info links
- Alternate spellings and scripts
- Additional details
Details like dates are replicated in the infobox, if it exists in the
article.
Other templates such as AKA's/IPA's are extremely useful but need to be
presented in a clear and structured manner. Some of this comes from the Manual
of style
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Lead_section#First_sentence>,
but it is abused in many cases.
Its sad, because many readers come to Wikipedia to answer the 'What is
this/ who is this' question. Google Knowledge panel strips out all brackets
and presents important details as a list, under the description.
We have started investigating solutions for this on mobile. I would
encourage you to try this out on mobile web or apps.
Thanks
Vibha & Kaity
---
Articles we used:
Bern <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bern>
Genghis Khan <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan>
Cephalopod <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod>
Mahatma Gandhi <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi>
Nietzsche <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche>
Carthage <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthage>
Phoenicia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenicia>
Timur <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timur>
----
Vibha Bamba
Senior Designer | WMF Design
--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation