Inline.
On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 1:28 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Steven Walling wrote:
It's really great to see Wikipedia highlighted as a source for news and current events. It's rare that people fully recognize the degree to which the "encyclopedia" is actually very good at trending news information. That said, the report paints a rosy picture that, strategically speaking, may not be cause for celebration.
Does the Knight Foundation disclose somewhere in this report that it's a donor to the Wikimedia Foundation?
I didn't see it in there. Looks like this was commissioned work.
Comparing Wikipedia to sites like BuzzFeed and CNN seems to be a pretty classic case of comparing apples to oranges.
It seems like it's contextualized in https://medium.com/mobile-first-news-how-people-use-smartphones-to/mobile-am... as follows:
"The information and reference site Wikipedia is linked to news behavior and is a critical pathway to the news and information ecosystem."
"Information and reference sites are linked to news behavior and often drive traffic to news content. Wikipedia figures prominently in mobile content access."
Neglecting to show people the value of the apps will help grow mobile web traffic in the short term, but in the long run may leave us entirely dependent on search (i.e. Google) or simply not growing readers, despite millions of people still coming online via mobile.
Can you elaborate on the value of the apps? HTTP is a free and open standard with very wide support. iOS is closed and proprietary. Maybe you can explain how investing resources into the latter aligns with Wikimedia's values?
The web and the apps are both ways to provide access to the openly licensed content. We should and do invest in both on the grounds of reaching users through popular channels.
I think Steven was talking about something different in terms of strategic risk of disintermediation, though. I don't see the future as dystopian. Rather I see a more utopian future requiring continued improvement in dialogue with communities and nurturing of partnerships.
Personally, I say hasten the day that we abolish the horrible "m." from our URLs and MobileFrontend from our servers.
I don't think it's something we're planning to do soon, but I agree it would be nice to consolidate domain names.
I don't think we're at the place where we can yet deliver on converging the full tech stack (and this was the feedback we basically received at the dev summit), although I think we should keep iterating on this discussion over the coming quarters. There are good things in MediaWiki Core and desktop-oriented extensions and there are good things in MobileFrontend, and I'm interested to see how we can port some things over if not consolidate some pieces.