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
Hello mobile Wikimedians,
The Wikimedia iOS app team is excited to announce our next major update is
now available on the app store:
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=32471523…
v6.3 is chock-a-block with fixes and features, including:
- Been having trouble syncing reading lists or downloading reading lists
to new devices? We fixed a ton of sync problems!
- Easy support for adding media from Wikimedia Commons in editing mode.
Press the media button and easily an images to add with a tap.
- Easy wiki link insertion and updating tool.
- Fix issues with currently reading article not reopening after app
background. Now when you return to the article it will still be there!
- Join the conversation with support for User talk built in. Go to
Settings and log in to see your user talk in a mobile friendly
presentation.
- A fresh new sticker pack from the Foundation's Communications team and
Giphy.
Thanks as always to our volunteer translators, coders and testers. If you'd
like to sign up to help beta test future versions, you can now sign up
directly here:
https://testflight.apple.com/join/Z0AU0KXC
Cheers,
Josh Minor
PM, Wikipedia for iOS
Hi
We have published a new maintenance release of Kiwix for iOS 1.9 branch.
Here is a short changelog:
* Fix memory usage issue when performing searches
* swift 5.2
* Version bump of libkiwix, realm and SwiftyUserDefaults
* Removed third party library ProcedureKit, now use
Foundation.OperationQueue to handle async tasks
Kiwix for iOS has been conceived for iPhone & iPad devices.
The app is available on iTunes at http://ios.kiwix.org.
Please share with us problems and remarks:
https://github.com/kiwix/apple/issues
Enjoy
Emmanuel
--
Kiwix - Wikipedia Offline & more
* Web: http://www.kiwix.org
* Twitter: https://twitter.com/KiwixOffline
* more: http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Communication
