On 1/21/08, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Didn't you watch the promo video we just had for the fundraiser? My most vivid memory from it is of a woman in Indonesia editing Wikipedia with a fullsize keyboard hooked up to her mobile phone. So be careful with the assumptions. :)
Heh, fair point. Ok, assume that there is a range of devices which would classify as "mobile", and perhaps we can't immediately tell how good the interface is when a user connects. We should probably default to something pretty basic, and, for those with the means to do so, have a 'view' menu or something where you can crank up your experience.
Incidentally, one thing that actually works really well is footnotes: on my phone browser you tend to be selecting links all the time, so you just 'click' when you're on an interesting footnote, it jumps to the definition, and you 'click' again to be back where you started. Very convenient. What doesn't work so well: pipetricked links [[tubgirl|like this one]] as there's really no way to tell where a link is going before you follow it.
Image captions also look pretty crappy and are hard to distinguish from the main text.
Links back to the title on each section would be handy, too.
And the toolbox could really be trimmed down: all that stuff like 'what links here' and 'community portal' and stuff is pretty much irrelevant for the basic use case. If someone is reduced to browsing wikipedia on their phone, it's most likely that they desperately need some piece of information to answer a query or a bet or something. It wouldn't be unreasonable to hide all that extra guff behind some link like 'toolbox' or something.
Steve