Hi everyone,
*tl;dr: We'll be stripping all content contained inside brackets from the
first sentence of articles in the Wikipedia app.*
The Mobile Apps Team is focussed on making the app a beautiful and engaging
reader experience, and trying to support use cases like wanting to look
something up quickly to find what it is. Unfortunately, there are several
aspects of Wikipedia at present that are actively detrimental to that goal.
One example of this are the lead sentences.
As mentioned in the other thread on this matter
<https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mobile-l/2015-March/008715.html>,
lead sentences are poorly formatted and contain information that is
detrimental to quickly looking up a topic. The team did a quick audit
<https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheets/d/1BJ7uDgzO8IJT0M3UM2q…>
of
the information available inside brackets in the first sentences, and
typically it is pronunciation information which is probably better placed
in the infobox rather than breaking up the first sentence. The other
problem is that this information was typically inserted and previewed on a
platform where space is not at a premium, and that calculation is different
on mobile devices.
In order to better serve the quick lookup use case, the team has reached
the decision to strip anything inside brackets in the first sentence of
articles in the Wikipedia app.
Stripping content is not a decision to be made lightly. People took the
time to write it, and that should be respected. We realise this is
controversial. That said, it's the opinion of the team that the problem is
pretty clear: this content is not optimised for users quickly looking
things up on mobile devices at all, and will take a long time to solve
through alternative means. A quicker solution is required.
The screenshots below are mockups of the before and after of the change.
These are not final, I just put them together quickly to illustrate what
I'm talking about.
- Before: http://i.imgur.com/VwKerbv.jpg
- After: http://i.imgur.com/2A5PLmy.jpg
If you have any questions, let me know.
Thanks,
Dan
--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation
Crossposting!
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Lani Goto <lgoto(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 11:18 AM
Subject: CREDIT showcase, Wednesday 2-August-2017
To: wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Hi!
I'd like to welcome you to join us at the CREDIT showcase next week,
Wednesday, 2-August-2017 at 1800 UTC / 1100 Pacific Time. We'd like to see
your demos, whether they're rough works in progress or polished production
material, or even just a telling of something you've been studying
recently. For more information on the upcoming event, as well as recordings
of previous events, please visit the following page:
<http://goog_1968694156/>
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/CREDIT_showcase
And if you'd like to share the news about the upcoming CREDIT showcase,
here's some suggested verbiage. Thanks!
*Hi <FNAME>*
*I hope all is well with you! I wanted to let you know about CREDIT, a
monthly demo series that we’re running to showcaseopen source tech projects
from Wikimedia’s Community, Reading, Editing, Discovery, Infrastructure and
Technology teams. *
*CREDIT is open to the public, and we welcome questions and discussion. The
next CREDIT will be held on August 2nd at 11am PT / 2pm ET / 18:00 UTC. *
*There’s more info on MediaWiki, and on Etherpad, which is where we take
notes and ask questions. You can also ask questions on IRC in the Freenode
chatroom #wikimedia-office (web-based access here). Links to video will
become available at these locations shortly before the event.*
*Please feel free to pass this information along to any interested folks.
Our projects tend to focus on areas that might be of interest to folks
working across the open source tech community: language detection,
numerical sort, large data visualizations, maps, and all sorts of other
things.*
*If you have any questions, please let me know! Thanks, and I hope to see
you at CREDIT.*
*YOURNAME*
--
Lani Goto
Project Assistant, Engineering Admin
--
Lani Goto
Project Assistant, Engineering Admin
Hello mobile Wikimedians,
Today we've released a beta of the Wikipedia app to TestFlight which
includes our most requested feature: dark reading mode!
Its just one of several new appearance options, including dark and sepia
color modes, image dimming and convenient screen brightness control.
This release also includes a new "On this day" card in the Explore feed for
four initial languages (English, German, French and Swedish). On this day
is built on the rich anniversary pages[1] and selected anniversaries[2]
available on many Wikipedias, to highlight important events that occurred
on this date. Tap through for a timeline view and swipe back through
history!
The beta also includes a small sticker pack for iMessage. We worked with
the Wikimedia Foundation's Communications team to create a set of public
domain stickers[3], so you can send wiki memes in texts. Now you can tell
your friends "citation needed!" in a group chat :) These stickers will be
coming to other social media platforms as well, but iOS beta testers get to
try them out first!
Thanks again to all our testers. If you'd like to become a tester please
sign-up here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfW7zFnUDYABvHLWlFclZ7OJEK82WjVIjs…
Thanks,
Josh Minor
PM, Wikipedia app for iOS
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_historical_anniversaries
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Selected_anniversaries/All
[3] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_digital_stickers
This is now done and deployed in production! Thanks to everyone involved.
Special thanks to Tyler and Chad for their help with the rather
unexpectedly messy deployment.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T171000
The resulting repos can be seen here:
https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-skins-MinervaNeuehttps://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-MobileFrontend
The next step would be to break the MobileFrontend dependency on the
Minerva skin. I've setup an epic
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T171000 (subtasks
to be filed as I find them) and would appreciate help doing this if anyone
is looking for a fun side project and interested in improving our skin
ecosystem!
There is a milestone on the MinervaNeue project tracking all open bugs:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/2799/
Your help is welcomed and appreciated!!
On Tue, Jul 4, 2017 at 10:46 AM יגאל חיטרון <khitron(a)post.bgu.ac.il>
wrote:
> Hi. The link [5] is dead.
> IKhitron
>
>
> 2017-07-04 20:45 GMT+03:00 Gergo Tisza <gtisza(a)wikimedia.org>:
>
>> Nice! Thanks for working on this.
>>
>> On Mon, Jul 3, 2017 at 7:03 PM, Jon Robson <jrobson(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>> > Dear all
>> > Back in 2014, Legoktm made the sensible suggestion [1] that we should
>> pull
>> > the skin portion of code from the MobileFrontend extension.
>> >
>> > I've spent the last few months making it possible and I now plan to make
>> > this a reality. I now plan to make this change on the 12th&13th July
>> with
>> > Chad (RainbowSprinkles) [2].
>> >
>> > I'm writing to give notice; answer questions and minimise the disruption
>> > that may cause. A while back when Vector was pulled out of MediaWiki
>> core,
>> > there was a little bit of pain so I'm keen to help people avoid this.
>> >
>>
> > *Developers:*
>
>
>> > Please make sure you update vagrant. Vagrant will install the new skin
>> as
>> > part of the MobileFrontend role and provided you do `vagrant git-update`
>> > you will not experience any breakage.
>> >
>> > If you are not using Vagrant, please install the new skin [3] and load
>> it
>> > using wfLoadSkin (after including MobileFrontend extension). When
>> > MobileFrontend stops working thats a sign you need to pull the latest
>> code
>> > from Master.
>> >
>>
> > *3rd parties who are using MobileFrontend in deployed wikis*
>
>
>> > Please be aware of this change when updating MobileFrontend. To be safe
>> > you should install the MinervaNeue skin [3] as part of your deploy
>> process
>> > and keep an eye on compatibility.
>> >
>> > The MinervaNeue skin and MobileFrontend are being kept backwards
>> > compatibility to ensure we do not break anything in Wikimedia's
>> production
>> > cluster, which is detailed in the Phabricator task [4].
>> >
>>
> > *Translators*
>
>
>> > As part of the migration I will be porting over translations to the new
>> > skin from MobileFrontend. There may be some changes to the message keys
>> > during this period of time so please bare this in mind when translating.
>> > The goal is to avoid unnecessary translations!
>> >
>>
> > *Why are you doing this?!!?*
>
>
>> > I've tried to write up this here [5]. Feel free to ask questions on the
>> > talk page there. It's a good conversation to have.
>> >
>>
> > *Can I just use MobileFrontend?*
>
>
>> > Sure. If you just have MobileFrontend it will give you a separate mobile
>> > site and you are free to use whatever skin you want there.
>> > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MobileFrontend#Setup_a_skin
>> >
>>
> > *Can I just use the Minerva skin and throw away my mobile site?*
>
>
>> > Not quite. But that's the next step that this enables... :) More on that
>> > later.
>> >
>>
> > *Any questions?*
>
>
>> > Feel free to reply to this thread with any concerns or questions you
>> have
>> > or any way I can improve this migration.
>> >
>>
> > *Can I do nothing?*
>
>
>> > If you do not update sure, but if you are updating your instance it's
>> > going to break soon if you do not do anything.
>> >
>> > Let me know if any questions!
>> > Jon
>> >
>> > [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T71366
>> > [2] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments#Week_of_July_10th
>> > [3] https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-skins-MinervaNeue
>> > [4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T166748
>> > [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/
>> > MobileFrontend_and_Minerva#..._but_why_do_we_care_about_
>> > Minerva_as_a_desktop_skin.3F
>> >
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Mobile-l mailing list
>> > Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
>> >
>> >
>>
> _______________________________________________
>> Wikitech-l mailing list
>> Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
> --
Jon Robson
Senior Software Engineer
Cross post.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Léa Lacroix <lea.lacroix(a)wikimedia.de>
Date: Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 4:31 AM
Subject: [Wikidata] wbEntity config variable to be deprecated
To: "Discussion list for the Wikidata project." <
wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hello,
This is an important message for *people who develop gadgets or user
scripts* for Wikidata’s frontend.
We plan to deprecate the wbEntity javascript config variable in the next
months. The variable is currently used on every page load, even if when it
is not useful (for example on mobile). With that change, we will increase
the load speed of the entity pages. After that the expression mw.config.get(
'wbEntity' ); will not work any more. All code that uses this config
variable should be migrated towards using the Mediawiki hook
wikibase.entityPage.entityLoaded.
When a user opens an entity page (item or property), as soon as the JSON
representation of the entity stored on the current entity page is loaded,
the Mediawiki hook wikibase.entityPage.entityLoaded is triggered. Listener
callbacks should expect the entity as a native JavaScript object (the
parsed JSON serialization) passed as the first (and only) argument.
Note: The entity object is completely frozen (read-only) to avoid the case
when one of the clients accidentally changes it and breaks other clients.
Here are a few examples on how you can use it:
// Basic usagemw.hook( 'wikibase.entityPage.entityLoaded' ).add(
function ( entity ) {
'use strict';
// Your code goes here
console.log( entity );} );
// Convert to jQuery promisevar entityPromise = $.Deferred( function (
deferred ) {
mw.hook( 'wikibase.entityPage.entityLoaded' ).add( function ( entity ) {
deferred.resolve( entity );
} );} ).promise();
// Convert to native promisevar entityPromise = new Promise( function
( resolve ) {
mw.hook( 'wikibase.entityPage.entityLoaded' ).add( function ( entity ) {
resolve( entity );
} );} );
See also: the related ticket <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T85499>, the
code of wikibase.entityPage.entityLoaded
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/EWBA/browse/master/repo/resourc…>
.
If you have any question or need support with migrating specific gadgets,
feel free to write to me.
Thanks,
--
Léa Lacroix
Project Manager Community Communication for Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.
_______________________________________________
Wikidata mailing list
Wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata
Hi folks,
The Wikimedia Commons app [1] (a community-maintained Android app that
allows users to upload photos to Commons from their phone) was funded via
an Individual Engagement Grant [2] last year and has several new features -
a list and map of nearby places that need photos (based on Wikidata),
category suggestions based on the image title, prevention of duplicate
uploads, and a new tutorial to educate new users on what types of photos
should or should not be uploaded. During the grant period, 20554 new files
were uploaded via the app with an overall deletion rate of 15.74% (11.7% in
the final two weeks after the new tutorial was implemented), and 3485
images that were uploaded via the app were used in Wikimedia articles.
While we are very happy with the progress made, there are many other
improvements that we would like to make but were not able to fit into the
scope of the previous grant. Thus we are proposing a renewal [3] of the IEG
in order to work on these. Highlights of the proposed improvements include:
- Enhancing the "Nearby places that need photos" feature by (1) allowing
users to upload their image directly from a location on the list or map,
with suggested title and categories based on the associated Wikidata item,
and (2) displaying the user's real-time position on the map to allow easier
navigation to the location they wish to photograph
- Improving user education by displaying Commons account and user talk
notifications (e.g. picture nominated for deletion) in the app, adding a
gallery of featured images, and adding various notices and explanations in
the upload screen
- A sleeker, more intuitive, and more interactive user interface - a
floating action button for uploads, "Nearby places that need photos" in a
tab alongside the user's contributions, and a panel to display Commons
account notifications and information about the nearest place that needs
photos
- Various technical and quality-of-life improvements, such as two-factor
authentication login, multiple uploads, preventing overwrites, and fixing
memory leaks and battery drain issues
We are especially excited about the "Nearby places that need photos"
enhancements, as we feel that it can help reduce the number of geo-located
Wikidata items that lack pictures, and provide pictures for Wikimedia
articles that lack them. We believe that this is one of our main strengths
as a mobile app - users can have a seamless workflow where they can browse
the places that need photos, select one and move to the location, and then
directly upload the photo after taking it (with relevant titles and
categories suggested), all within the same app and without needing to use a
computer.
Please do take a look at our proposal [3], feel free to provide feedback
and make new suggestions on the Discussion page, and/or endorse the
proposal if you see fit. If you would like to be part of the project, new
volunteers and additions to our diverse team are always welcome - please
visit our GitHub repository [4] and say "Hi". :)
Many thanks!
Regards,
Josephine (Commons app project maintainer)
[1] *https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.free.nrw.commons
<https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.free.nrw.commons>*
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Improve_%
27Upload_to_Commons%27_Android_App
[3]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Improve_%27Upload_to_Commons…
[4] https://github.com/commons-app/apps-android-commons
> The official Wikimedia app, downloaded by millions, and rated 4.4
Isn't it the "Wikipedia" app or am I mistaken?
BTW, I guess there's a similar correction required for the subject.
--
Kaartic
Hello,
The official Wikimedia app, downloaded by millions, and rated 4.4 stars by
users, is looking for a full time product owner!
Join the Wikimedia Foundation and work with great engineers, designers,
researchers and communities of users to build features, products and
services relied on by people around the world. This is a unique opportunity
to take an already great product, but with a ton of room to grow, to the
next level, while also doing good for the world.
Check out the official job posting here:
https://boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/jobs/753793?gh_src=24av8w1#.WWZwJRPy…
Or if you know a great, experienced, app PM, who loves open source software
and free knowledge, please spread the word!
Cheers,
Josh Minor
Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation
Hello,
I've just released a dictionary app for iOS based on Wiktionary data [1]
[2].
It works offline, it's free (as in beer), doesn't have ads and
integrates with the iOS Wikipedia app. However it's not
open source, although that is something I'm considering for later. I
haven't had much feedback so far so I'm really
curious if you find it useful in its current stage. The main intention
is to turn it into a tool for language learning, but it's
not quite there yet. It should already be useful as a general purpose
offline dictionary though.
Jan
[1]
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2017/July#mot.C3.AE.…
[2]
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=10461228…
