Topic on Talk:VisualEditor on mobile/Flow

Nice efforts! But pretty disappointing to see these efforts being limited to "mobile" devices. "Mobile" devices are perfectly normal computers, just with a smaller physical screen. Also, there's no boundary between "mobile" and not mobile devices. Smartphone <-> tablet <-> laptop <-> desktop is effectively all the same, just with growing screen sizes (what about a phone connected to a large desktop screen? What about desktop users using a small window?).

Very obviously, desktop users would benefit from all these enhancements as well, so please remove this artifical distinction. Wikipedia is one community!

This is a problem, I agree, also for mobile users.

For example I have been trying to participate in a WMF "mockup" of a tool that will supposedly replace "wiki-blame", and only after spending (wasting?) precious time figured out WMF has no intention of making it available for non-desktop devices. Apparently the use of mobile devices never even crossed the minds of the developers.

That's not true; they did consider mobile users. They have posted an explanation for why the current project is a browser extension, how that interacts with mobile devices (namely, Chrome for Android doesn't support any browser extensions), and their goal is to make it technologically possible for the code to run on Firefox for Android, i.e., on a mobile device.

Note also that the older version isn't going away, because lots of people are unable to install browser extensions (e.g., students using school computers).

reply to whatamidoing:

This is not what I remember, but granted, my participation in the mockup tool discussion happened a couple of wiki-centuries ago. The way I remember it, the access via mobile was raised as a question, and only then we were told they had difficulties implementing it.

btw, it is only by sheer luck that I found this discussion here which is, I assume still alive? when I checked it by going through my contributions it appeared that my reply button was greyed out. I wonder how many others who posted a question here gave up on getting an answer and did not happen to notice another button on the top left of the box (it is gone now so I can no longer tell you what it said)?

reply to Traumflug :

years ago it was possible to treat mobile devices as just another type of computer. In my experience it was much easier to participate in editing in those days. Nowadays the wiki-software recognizes some devices as mobile and automatically switches editors over to a different platform, I think?

Yes, there's some automatic detection in place. Some people prefer one or the other. I hear that there are semi-regular rounds of people discovering that the mobile site works on their desktop systems and sharing the "secret" on social media. And of course many long-time editors prefer the desktop interface even on small phones.

There are some differences in device power, and the screen size is very important for the design. A typical laptop screen can have many tools displayed in a single row, and a smartphone might have room for just five (approximately one small button for every 20 mm in screen width). Additionally, the interactions with soft keyboards require separate programming.

Is there anything in particular that you would like to see on both platforms?

Yes, now that you mention it I believe the wikipedia interface was much more basic when I first joined wikipedia (before 2010). At the time there were no notifications, and probably other things which I do not remember. What I do remember is that at the time I was very impressed with the system since it was very robust and all the software I used (maybe I did not use everything that was available?), seemed to always work and quickly. Since then we have a lot more tools, but they do not always work, the whole system goes down every so often, at least it does on the severs I happen to use, and some tools are so slow they may as well not exist as far as I am concerned :-)

No. They stopped working on Flow before they got to things like making it possible to split and rearrange comments, or even as far as testing what indentation systems make sense. At the moment, everything that's in consecutive order (same indentation level) is considered a reply to the comment above it. "Indented" comments only appear if you reply to something in the middle of a thread.