Talk:Wikimedia Apps

Previous page history was archived for backup purposes at Talk:Wikimedia Apps/LQT Archive 1 on 2015-07-10.

A Wiktionary app is required and very much crucial. The old app had 1 million+ downloads

Multilingual content for the new Abstract Wikipedia is very much needed. Wiktionaries have very less multilingual content even though the individual language versions have enough native language entries.

Wiktionary would greatly benefit from an editing App as the literature search needed is very simple to add content to entries. Adding translations would be conveniently done from a smartphone.

Wiktionary do not even have most of the translations already available as Wikidata entry labels. An app that also fetch from Wikidata Labels and also interact with Wikidata Lexeme space would be hugely beneficial.

Wiktionary is very suitable for a mobile editing App. Please make one. Thank you!

The android app is displaying a "on this day" card with a structured timeline of events for english, but not for other languages. How is this data extracted, so that we can implement this for other languages?

I'd like to know, too.

I'm so sorry I didn't see this question!

The 'onthisday' data is served via this rest endpoint. Here's an example of a call to the endpoint:

https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/feed/onthisday/events/01/15

The endpoint extracts this data by teasing out some structure from "day pages", like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_15.

It's not a perfect approach - ideally we'll get this data from wikidata at some point (or use this endpoint to seed wikidata records for days of the year?) - but it's been useful in the mean time.

The structure of these day pages varies a bit (or a lot) by language wiki, so I tried to abstract away the language logic. Here's a mirror of the file that contains the language specific logic used by the onthisday parser (which I wrote). I added handling for a few languages which, at the time, seemed to have a page for each day of the year, but I got side-tracked by other work since.

I'd like to circle back and audit the state of all language wikis' day page coverage again. If a language has a page for every day of the year the parser isn't too hard to update iirc. I seem to remember it taking an hour or 2 per lang?

Hope this helps!!

Hi @MHurd (WMF): and thank you for working on this!

This topic was raised by a few Ukrainian Wikipedia users on Twitter here: they were quite disappointed that Ukrainian is not supported, while Russian is.

We have standard pages for Ukrainian Wikipedia (actually Main page sections) named per Ukrainian MONTHNAMEGEN, e.g. uk:Вікіпедія:Проект:Цей день в історії/2 квітня for today.

Can you please add them to processing, or is something we need to do to make them machine-readable? Thanks

Thanks! It's a start.

Here's an idea for a future improvement: Instead of collecting month names and section names in all languages, could you make a standardized set of internal formats and names that could be used in all languages? For example, instead of "January 16, 2019" people would write "2016-01-16"? If people really want dates written in words in page titles, it could probably be handled with redirects.

Another idea is to reuse the same ultramagical parser that automatically converts dates written with words into an internal presentation on Wikidata.

And instead of section names, could it have HTML classes or ids that would be the same across all languages?

Or maybe these section names could be made into a translatable file and translated on translatewiki? This would be far easier to contribute to than to submit Git pull requests to JS code.

Oh, and what about the other main page sections, such as "In the news"?

@MHurd (WMF) thank you. Please check this https://github.com/wikimedia/wikifeeds/pull/3/files

@Amire80 the existing approach is ok since it doesn't need wiki modifications. Using special structure, even in the form of templates, onwiki would make other tools break and make contribution harder.

Well, yeah, that's the nature of change :)

Making it more uniform will make it easier to do for all languages. Currently, it can be done only for languages that created their own structure and submitted a Git patch.I propose to reduce the number of steps by making the Git patch unnecessary.

I use the Wikipedia app almost every day and one issue that I've encountered is this: The moment another tab is brought to the front, the previous tab is emptied from the RAM, so if you go back to it, it will take a few moments before it's loaded again. The problem is, if you want to compare some data between two pages, let's say the factsheet of two cities, it will be annoyingly slow, and every time you switch between tabs, you have to wait for it to reload and go back to the same position in the page. It would be really helpful to have the option in the settings to keep the tabs actively open (on the RAM) as long as the app hasn't been closed. Thank you for a great job!

Thanks for the feedback! We appreciate you taking the time to write it down.

Please remove the option to edit Wikidata descriptions. If an article is protected because of vandalism, vandals will continue to edit the Wikidata description. And this description only appears for the mobile version, less people will see the vandalism and it will take time to revert. There is a lot of vandalism going on. Remove that option!

Thank you for flagging this, our team will discuss this and provide an update here.

If an article is protected, the description should not be editable from the app. On which specific article is this happening?

In a recent release of the Wikipedia app for Android, a new bottom toolbar was introduced. While this toolbar is more in line with current Android UX standards, a function was removed that I would consider crucial to using Wikipedia on a mobile device: searching text inside an article, i.e. "Find in page" (German: "In Seite finden").

Obviously, UI elements located at the top of an app are more difficult to reach than the ones located at the bottom. That's why functions used often should be accessible from the bottom toolbar rather than from the top "..." menu.

One way to accomplish this might be to implement a long-press functionality for the bottom toolbar search butten, i.e. short-pressing the button opens the article search function while long-pressing opens an overlay input field that allows searching inside the page.

I'd be interested to hear your opinion.

Screenshot: New Wikipedia Android App "Find in Page" functionality

Screenshot: Bottom toolbar from old Wikipedia Android app

Thank you for the feedback! This is something we're actively looking into. You can follow our thoughts and process here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T266884

Until two weeks ago the Wikipedia app 2.7.50278-r-2019-12-12 was running without problems on my Android mobile phone (LG-P710). But since then I get the error message (in German): "Es ist ein Fehler aufgetreten - Zurück gehen". To install the app new, did not help.Is the app to old or is my Android 4.4 to old? Is there any other thing I can do? The error message appears independently from the subject I am searching for. It also appears, when I'm try to open the Wikipedia start page.

@Peter231: Android: 2.3 and above should work fine, could you please re-login, hope that will work well.

Sorry, but this does not change anything. Whether I log in or not, I always get get the error message "Es ist ein Fehler aufgetreten" (an error arises).

I switched the phone off and on several times in the last week. This does not help. When I start Wikipedia I always see "Wikipedia durchsuchen", "Hauptseite ansehen" and "Würfeln". I can select what I want or enter a search item. The error message is always the same.

I have 2.7.277-r-2019-12-11 and it suddenly stopped working on Android 4.2.2 also, a couple days ago.

@ABaso_(WMF), JoeWalsh (WMF), CGauthier (WMF), DBrant (WMF): could someone please look into this.

Hello,

For Android 4.4 and below, our Android app hasn't been supported for quite a while, and is no longer guaranteed to work. It is likely that our Operations team has updated some security settings on our servers, which is preventing very old versions of the app from connecting successfully. Unfortunately we do not plan on making further updates or security backports to support KitKat and lower, since these versions of Android have reached end-of-life long ago, and no longer get security updates from Google itself.

The timing of these "server updates" is rather indifferent to what's going on in the world. In many areas, due to disease and job loss, people cannot afford to buy new phones, or even venture out to retailers (should any still be open) to risk their health searching for new new technology. I would have thought more consideration might have been made before cutting users off with no regard to the global situation. I might anticipate that when Wikipedia's typical requests for donations appear, they may be met with equal indifference.

Are you still able to access Wikipedia in your regular Web Browser app on your device?

Hello, I have the same problem and do not understand why a simple app does not work anymore. What is the point of changing things (which work fine) all the time just for the sake of change. Once things then do not work anymore the "security update" excuse is used - as if a wikipedia search was a security risk. I will not buy a new tablet, but will stop making my donation each year.

It is the same for me exactly. Any changes i do have no result. I can access wikipedia by using a browser, but the App is not working. I have Android 4.4.2.

This is unfortunate, as i used the App very frequently and it is not as nice to use wikipedia through a mobile browser. It would be very nice if you could fix that error. I always get the message "Es ist ein Fehler aufgetreten". No page gets displayed at all. Reinstallation of the app does not change anything unfortunately.

Same problem here. It does not work on Chrome either. However, WikiWand is actually working for me, so I just go through that.

Is there any App for WikiWand, by any chance?

We'll fix the connection issue for Android 4.4 by adding Google Play Services, which should allow KitKat users to continue using the app. We're aiming for September 15.

Thanks for update.

Just checking, has this worked for anyone yet? If so, what version are you running and where can it be downloaded? I see a new version (wikipedia-2.7.50332-r-2020-09-28) is out, but it does not appear in Google Play on KitKat phone, and the its downloaded .APK will not install. Thanks.

Still not working on my KitKat tablet. There were no updates to the app in September that fixed this. A very bad move for Wikipedia, imagine how many million people around the world with older devices cannot access it easily now.

There was an unfortunate delay in this. It should soon be fixed. We'll update this thread as soon as it has been.

Hi folks, we have made an update that should solve the connection issues on older versions of Android. Please check the Play Store for an updated version of the app, and let us know if there are any further issues.

Just installed the update and everything is back to normal. Great!

I installed the update and it's certainly an improvement so thank you. One thing though, when viewing an article, touching a picture does not go to the bigger stand-alone image but instead gives a black screen that says (!) "This page does not exist" with a "GO BACK" button. Tried with several articles and same behaviour every time. I checked with a friend and the image displays normally on Marshmallow so maybe still a Kitkat issue. Don't know if that's an easy fix but at least articles load now.

Thank you for reporting the issue.

I don't know if this is somewhat related to the above problem, but the Wikipedia app on my iPod Touch (v. 5.1.1 on iOS 8.4) is not working as it should as of yesterday my time zone. Searching anything results in "Request failed..." cannot log in either. The app on my iPad mini (v5.7.2 on iOS 9.3.5) is working fine. Did anything change on the API?

No change on our side. From the error it sounds like issues connecting to the network or our servers. Can you confirm you can reach wikipedia.org from Safari on your phone?

Network connection is fine. Can also reach Wikipedia.org through an old version of Chrome (47.0.2526.107, the latest version compatible by iOS 8.4). However on stock Safari (again on iOS 8.4), I get this "Your Browser's Connection Security is Outdated" page instead.

Please add a highlight option.

Just to understand what it is you want, what do you want to use it for? Save highlights for re-reading later? Share with other app users? Something else?

I am not sure if this is the right place to discuss features of the Android app. I really love Wikipedia and the app and thus I have 70 tabs open. However, I am really not interested in managing these tabs, as I prefer to use the search function. Can I disable to use tabs or close all tabs regularly?

Thanks for your support and work for Wiki!

Hi! It's not possible to disable using tabs. If you go to the tabs view and click on the overflow menu (the three dot menu) in the upper right, you will see a "close all tabs" function.

Thanks for your reply. A corresponding idea was added as an idea for improvement: Topic:Vroqgrqnomirtdsh

U gave a edit option on it ...if someone upload a wrong info on it ..then what will u do?

The Wikipedia communities have very long experience of handling vandalism and mistakes on the wikis. We, as app developers, are merely supplying writing tools.

In short, a) there are filters in place, b) there are bots removing obvious vandalism, c) recent changes are constantly patrolled, d) articles are typically watched by people familiar with the subject, in case something less obvious passes through the recent changes patrolling. Admins on the wiki might block the person doing the editing, in case it's intentionally wrong.

How to create new content on Wikipedia.