On 12/12/12 01:04, MZMcBride wrote:
Looking at the big picture, I don't think we'll ever see widespread editing from mobile devices. The user experience is simply too awful. The best I think most people are hoping for is the ability to easily fix a typo, maybe, but even then you have to assess costs vs. benefit. That is, is it really worth paying two or three full-time employees so that someone can easily change "Barrack" to "Barack" from his or her iPhone? Probably not.
Then maybe the only feature needed by the mobile apps is a "highlight article content" and "email me a bookmark to this when I'm on desktop".
David Gerard wrote:
OTOH, see recent coverage of Wikipedia in Africa, where it's basically going to be on phones. Cheap shitty smartphones. That the kids are *desperate* to get Wikipedia on. Do we want to make those readers into editors? It'd be nice.
Have a link? 'Cheap smartphone' seems a contradiction.
I think there is a field for mobiles and one for desktop. You could do one tasks from the other? Probably, but not as well as if you used the right tool*. The proper optimization should be done, it's ok to make things *possible*, but trying to force everything to work one way (eg. Windows 8) is the wrong path imho.
* Note that there are valid cases in which you have to use a suboptimal tool.