[Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness

[Kirill Lokshin]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 3:02 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 12 April 2011 19:46, Quim Gil <quim.gil at nokia.com> wrote:
>
> > In fact Wikimedia content is also popular among mobile users (directly
> > or through apps), but what about mobile contributions?
>
> I just tried editing an article on en:wp on my shiny new BlackBerry
> 9300. (Which can browse Wikipedia just fine.) It was ridiculously
> annoying and I'm not sure I'd bother fixing typos I spotted in casual
> reading.
>
> (At least Vector worked in that version of the BlackBerry browser ...)
>
> Does anyone here edit any of the WMF wikis, or any other wiki, on
> their phone much? What's it like, and what's the phone?


I've edited a number of times from an iPhone (both 3G and 4).  It's doable,
in principle -- at least for basic editing -- but I wouldn't describe it as
a very user-friendly experience.

One particular issue I've encountered is that multi-line input fields (i.e.
standard MediaWiki edit boxes) are fairly difficult to work with on the iOS
Safari interface; scrolling through the field is either extremely slow or
doesn't work at all.  This isn't as big a deal when editing articles; but
for talk pages -- where one normally intends to reply at the bottom of a
section -- the scrolling required can quickly become prohibitively
time-consuming.

(I'm not sure whether it would be possible to have the edit field
auto-scroll to the bottom of the available text, at least for certain mobile
devices.  Alternately, LiquidThreads might solve the problem as well,
assuming we ever get them.)

Kirill