On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 7:26 PM, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 21 August 2014 05:31, Strainu
<strainu10(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2014-08-21 9:30 GMT+03:00 Federico Leva (Nemo)
<nemowiki(a)gmail.com>om>:
It would *seem* that every user
converted to the mobile site is a step towards
extinction of the wiki.
That is an excellent point Frederico. In addition to the inherent
difficulties of editing on small screen, especially large articles and
the "we know better approach" discussed in detail in the last weeks,
there is also the problem of navigating between articles - the mobile
website arbitrarily skips some elements visible on desktop, such as
navboxes and significantly alter some infoboxes because "it doesn't
look good". This makes it difficult to just browse the Wikipedia (thus
finding mistakes that you might want to correct) and encourages
searching for the information, which means going right on target
Hopefully the future announced at Wikimania, "no more mobile team, but
mobile in every team" will solve some of these problems. It's just a
matter of when will this future be.
Well, now. Here's a classic example of what is sometimes called a "first
world problem". I know that, even on desktops, the more infoboxes and
navboxes and succession boxes on an article (regardless of article length),
the longer it takes to load. On a slower desktop collection, some really
large, complex articles sometimes time out.
I went to look at some of those same articles using my smartphone with the
"desktop" option turned on. Many of them timed out without fully loading;
others took several minutes. There was a very, very noticeable difference
in load time between the mobile view and the desktop view. And that was in
North America with fast, very good connection on an up-to-date phone. Many
of our editors and readers don't have this kind of infrastructure available
to them.
So - we know there is a definite cost to having all these "navigation aids"
in articles. We need to justify their use, instead of simply adding them
by reflex. So here is where analytics teams can really be useful: tell us
whether or not these navboxes are actually being used to go to other
articles. If they're widely used to leap to the next article, then we need
to find ways to make them more efficient so that they're suitable for
mobile devices. If they're hardly ever being used, we need to reconsider
their existence. Perhaps this becomes some sort of "meta data" tab from
articles. The current format isn't sustainable, though.
If we're talking about navboxes, they are navigational and I agree the
software should replace them with something else, or drop them
entirely, if it helps rendering performance or the UI design.
I'd be interested to hear of examples of infoboxes that are being
altered by the mobile view. I expect it being done for overly complex
parts of some infoboxes.
While we're talking about the first world problem, I have first hand
experience that the MediaViewer is a backwards step for people on
dialup (e.g. people in regional Australia who rarely get the telco
promised maximum of 28.8kbit/s) or on crappy mobile connections (which
is most of Indonesia, fwiw, where many people use a _desktop_ or old
laptop connected to the internet via 3G modem or their mobile phone).
Sure "they" can disable it with their preferences, but to get to that
they need to download the MediaViewer software and *while* the image
is downloading at a much higher res than it would have previously,
figure out to scroll down, and press the 'Disable Media Viewer' link.
*But*, that only works on the normal website. On the mobile website,
I cant figure out how to disable the Media Viewer. To check I wasnt
missing something, I asked someone at the Wikimedia Indonesia office
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth/Beeyan) to try to
disable it on his phone, and he couldnt work it out either.
Go to:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_Protection_Act_of_1970
Scroll down to the "Tennessee Walking Horse" photo and click on it.
As far as I can see it has downloaded the 200+KB photo, and I may
either close the MediaViewer or go to the page on Commons. There are
no other options.
We can't figure out how to disable this. Even after logging in on the
mobile site, there is no preference to disable it in the Settings.
If you click the Details button to return to go to Commons, only a
70KB photo is shown, which is what used to occur.
--
John Vandenberg