On-wiki communication
The mobile interfaces of Wikipedia have varying levels of support for notice and talk features that are core to the healthy and effective participation of editors. This page documents the current state and the work of several teams at the Wikimedia Foundation to address these gaps.
This page provides a central, high-level, watchable page to track the progress of this work. As teams reach major milestones we’ll keep this page updated. The table on this page indicate a team’s understanding of how completely the issue has been addressed. "Yes" items are complete and the team(s) believes it has addressed the issue for all wikis. The table on this page are for tracking progress across languages and form factors. "No" items have not yet been completed, but many are in progress or being investigated. Other items are partially complete or have limited availability. If you believe an item should be given a different status please go to the individual Phabricator task or talk page to provide feedback on that specific issue, if they are linked.
Each team maintains individual project pages and Phabricator tasks for their work, and we consider those team documents to be the most direct way to stay updated on specific issues or platforms. The individual project pages or Phab tickets are also the best place to provide feedback or specific suggestions on individual features.
Overview
edit| Editor | Desktop | Mobile Web | iOS | Android | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (IP) | (User) | (IP) | (User) | (IP) | (User) | (IP) | (User) | |
| Tag | (none) | Mobile web edit | iOS app edit | Android app edit | ||||
| "New message" alert[a] | Peach bar of doom | Miniature orange bar of doom [b] | Flaky[1][c] | Looks like other alerts[2] | No[3][d] | Yes (since Jun 2022)[4] | Kinda, but subject to certain weird limitations[e][d][5] | Yes (with ding+vibrate) |
| Other alerts[a] | N/A | Yes[f] | N/A | Yes | N/A | Yes (since Jun 2022)[4] | N/A | Yes (w/ ding+vibrate) [7] |
| Custom block messages | Yes | Yes | Yes[8] | Yes[8] | Yes (since Mar 2023)[9] | Yes (since Mar 2023)[9] | Yes[10] | Yes[11] |
| Partial block shown as partial | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes[11] | Yes[11] |
| Edit notices[g] | Yes[h][i] | Yes[h][i] | Yes via T316178 and JavaScript gadget[12] | Yes via T316178 and JavaScript gadget[12] | Yes[13] | Yes[13] | Yes[14] | Yes[14] |
| Talk page banners (e.g. {{FAQ}}) | Yes | Yes | Yes[15] | Yes[15] | Yes, but some messages have parsing issues[16][17] | Yes, but some messages have parsing issues[16][17] | Yes, fixed at top[j] | Yes, fixed at top[j] |
| Custom edit filter messages | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes (since Mar 2023) | Yes (since Mar 2023) | Mostly[k][18] | Mostly[k][18] |
| Central Notices[l] | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No[m] | No[m] | No[m] | No[m] |
This table has been copied and adapted from w:en:Wikipedia:Mobile communication bugs, which provided a very good overview. Thanks especially to Suffusion of Yellow for their documentation work.
Related pages
editWikiCommunication offers an overview of what the Wikimedia Foundation's Product Department is doing in to improve communication between volunteers using MediaWiki talk pages.
The Android team has a project page for communication and the iOS team a project page for notifications, as well as a page for Talk support under development.
Talk pages project offers an overview of the suite of improvements the Editing Team is making to talk pages on the mobile and desktop site. To see the features available at any given wiki, visit Talk pages project/Deployment Status.
The Moderator Tools team is working on content moderation tools for mobile web which could include some work on communication aspects such as edit notices.
Notes
edit- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Users with a confirmed email address will get an email by default. This can be turned off in their preferences.
- ↑ Shown in Vector (default), MonoBook, and Modern skins. Looks like other alerts in Timeless and MinerveNeue skins.
- ↑ Alert should appear on non-mainspace pages, and any time the user taps "edit". However a caching bug often prevents the alert from showing.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Improvements will be possible once Temporary Accounts have been implemented
- ↑ Requires the IP to save another page before showing it, and looks like a normal alert
- ↑ (fixed January 2023) On Minerva skin (on desktop), notifications that are not alerts were not shown when opening the notification area. This means notifications like "thanks", "(pagename) has been reviewed" and "(user) replied in (topic)" were not shown. Mentions and talk page message notifications are alerts, so those were not affected.[6]
- ↑ See also meta:Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Mobile and apps/Mobile editnotices and phab:T201613. The WMF intends to pick this up. For individual wikis, a workaround for mobile web exists.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 (fixed July 2022) On Minerva skin (on desktop), the notices were not shown since 18 July 2017 until 8 July 2022.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 When using DiscussionTools, the notices are only shown for new sections.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 Example Android talk page
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Links in the message open in the browser, and go the language wiki of the users primary language (ie the first language they've set)
This means that as an example that an user whose languages are set as Dutch, English will always have links go to the Dutch Wikipedia, even when the message is displayed on the English Wikipedia - ↑ CentralNotice banners can be configured to display only on some device classes as needed.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 CentralNotice banners are often not optimized for Apps. They include links to web, which do not display well in the app.
Phabricator tickets
edit- ↑ Mobile web has a caching bug affecting IP user talk pages, Resolved: phab:T295910: Yellow talk page message banner appearing inconsistently on edit page.
- ↑ Regarding mobile web's user talk page alerts, see phab:T240976.
- ↑ phab:T312196: IP editor talk page notification
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 phab:T274404: Support notifications on the iOS app
- ↑ Resolved: phab:T291481: Determine approach for notifications for IP Editors on Android
- ↑ phab:T306737 On Minerva desktop, notification icon only opens alerts (never notifications)
- ↑ phab:T281413: Show notifications about Talk messages while browsing articles.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 phab:T261944: Show full reason in mobile block message drawer
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 phab:T275118: iOS app does not show block messages
- ↑ Resolved: phab:T276147 and phab:T276149. We've made updates as much as we can without backend bandwidth, we are open to adding a step in the workflow that encourages IP editors to login after receiving block messages (project page update).
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 phab:T276147: Android application does not show block messages
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 See also mw:Edit Check project
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 phab:T201596: iOS app does not present edit notices
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 phab:T201597: Android app does not present edit notices
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 phab:T312309: Unify experience for making lead section content available on mobile talk pages
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 phab:T360236 Parsing/display issues with coffee roll / talk page banners.
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 Resolved: phab:T310275: As a contributor/reader, I want to be able to have a brief overview of the main topics on each article talk page.
- ↑ 18.0 18.1 Resolved: phab:T276139: Android application does not display custom AbuseFilter messages