Wikimedia Mobile engineering/Strategy/2013-2014 planning

The mobile department held an annual planning meeting to help define the way forward through the 2013-2014 fiscal year. This document contains notes taken during the meeting.

Original etherpad: http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/2012-2013-Annual-Planning-Mobile-Dept

Agenda

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  • Intro and annual goals presented (30 mins) 1000-1030 [Maryana]
    • Goal: Unify department around annual goals
  • Persona analysis (30 mins) 1030-1100 [Maryana]
    • Goal: Develop firm understanding of the types of users for whom we will build features
  • Break (5 mins) 1100-1105
    • Goal: Find relief from tedium of meeting
  • High-level features brainstorming session (85 mins) 1105-1230 [Arthur]
    • Goal: Generate rich backlog of feature ideas/feature buckets that will help us achieve our 6k contributors goal
    • R36, R63, R64, R66 (remote friendly), collab areas available
  • Lunch (30 mins) 1230-1300
    • Goal: Stuff face
  • Big-picture strategizing (60 mins) 1300-1400 [Tomasz?]
    • Goal: Develop overarching strategy for achieving our second goal of $goal
  • Mobile apps/web cross-pollination 1400-?!
  • Get out of the office and use our tools! Play with the commons app, mobile web, etc. out in the wild.

Personas

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  • Reader
  • Newly registered user (0 edits)
  • Newish user (1-10 edits, 1-5 uploads)
    • Watchlist user
    • Editor
    • Uploader
  • Commons power user (> 100 uploads)
  • Wikipedia power user (> 100 edits)

High level brainstorming feature buckets

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  • categories (+sample images?)
  • CTAs
  • Article creation
  • WikiData Editing
  • Authentication

Micro-Contributions

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+ Jared + Max +Monte +Kaldari

  • Dabsolver
  • Adding Geo-coordinates to articles/images
    • Correcting locations on existing articles
    • Matching foursquare locations to article names
      • Collaborate with Foursquare?
  • Trump geotagged images with higher quality ones
  • Images Actions
    • Flagging as inappropriate
    • Adding tags/categories
    • Rating images within categories
      • Rating on metrics of artistic, technical, educational
      • For automatic lead images for articles?
    • Hot or Not for images within categories (most representative for a place, thing, person, etc)
    • Firehose of new image with swipe gestures for triage (Up - ok, right - copyright, etc.)
  • "Rating/approving/reverting" contributions by IP users / Flag content
    • What is a mobile appropriate ammount of "change" to verify via mobile,
      • Diffs are within a sentence
      • Consider only taking action on down-voted "bad" edits
    • Can we test users to determine if someone is a "good reviewer" by showing them fake things to review
      • like on Stack Overflow/Quora/Foursquare: show them stuff that we already know to be good or bad
    • investigate Mechanical Turk interface to verify edits
    • How do you classify "wrongness" and at what granularity, e.g. is badly written, needs citations, photos, inappropriate.
    • Make New Page Triage tool mobile friendly
  • Text transcription from scanned Wikisource
  • Improve Wikidata Items with properties to wikidata items within specific categories like people, places, etc
    • Is this person alive?
    • What do they do?
    • Male/female/other
  • Rating search queries off-site to their target articles as a good match or not to improve article metadata
    • collaborate with Google?
  • Translation
    • based on knowledge of a particular user prompt the user to translate all or part of the article

Getting started (newbies) (R 36)

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+ Vibha + Maryana + Jon +Adam +Dan

  • Post-registration: suggest a task [possibly contextual, based on what you read/have watched]
  • Left nav browse tasks & contribute - persistent link in the left nav for all registered users
  • Banners to registered users [taking them to contribute page, point them to edit button, features like Nearby]
  • Post-registration: takes user to home page w/ some stats about me and a CTA to contribute if I never have
  • Post-registration: fill out quick "what do you love?" survey (multiple choice) - we give you tasks based on this
  • Post-registration: make an edit to userspace/fill out profile to learn markup
  • Different post-registration experience depending on where you came from

Reverts (watchlist, history, RecentChanges Patrol) r66

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+ Juliusz + Arthur + May + Howie

Personas for these

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  • Reader: help them understand WP is written by people, that the content changes
  • Newish user/Newly registered: help them understand how WP works, introduce them to these features
  • WP Power user: help them get their Wikipedia on

History

  • Sane mobile view that a human can understand with smiley faces
    • simplified version -- includes the most important for information for a editors to make a decision as to whether they want to view diff
    • design this so new editors understand there are people behind the page
    • capture motion of articles, as well as individuals that contributed
  • Better entry point into history (from article)
  • Direct revert/thanks? (if information can support decision); see below for comments on reverting
  • Summaries (e.g., top editors, most reverted editors, etc.); most helpful edits (e.g., large changes that haven't been reverted)

Watchlist

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  • Different filters
  • Same things as above (motion, people)

History and Watchlist

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  • Friendly Reverting (e.g., ability to revert, but automatically leave a talk page message to user, "Hey, we appreciate your edit, but it was reverted because there wasn't a citation. . .")
  • Unfriendly reverting (e.g., ability to warn/block user)
  • UX for reverting makes nice the path of least resistance
  • Thanking user for contribution

Problems to anticipate

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  • Reverting too easy, vandalism
  • Reverts not possible because of merge conflicts (how to deal with them, what kind of feedback/UI to provide)

Recent changes [WP power]

  • Make into an app! AND a view on mobile web
  • Could really drive reversions and stuff

Diff

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  • Better diff management -- fix UX (entry point is history, watchlist, recent changes, etc.)
    • Better way of viewing diffs that aren't next to each other (e.g.,
      • Be able to easily compare multiple and arbitrary revisions
      • Ability to view all changes from one editor (in succession)
    • How much has changed since last time I viewed page
    • Ability to
  • Improved diff view
  • Entry points into different actions

User contribs (related to all of this; my and other)

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  • Contribs that doesn't suck

Upload Campaigns

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[Tomasz] [YuviPanda] [Brion] (r64)
  • Plans starting so far - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Yuvipanda/Mobile_campaigns
  • Make a campaign for Nearby?
  • campaigns largely a funnel for new users -- let them know what sort of stuff to contribute
  • wiki loves monumets is a known funnel
  • wiki takes [city] projects are similar in needs, on smaller scale
  • decentralize campaign creation and maintenance -- currently restricted because theres no edit history etc
  • apps offline functionality -- easy to do fr baic campaigns; harder if we integrate geo search like wlm or nearby
  • campaign discovery: featured campaigns, active campaigns, [your interests?], keyword search, nearby
  • mixing with categories or wikidata?
  • gamification? leaderboards, showing activity, talk page
    • stats shouldnt be hard t generate; might need db tables to hold accumulated data. in the ext that supplies the info
  • need machine readable licenses!!!!!
  • triage: show a stream [per campaign, per cat, per user?] and have buttons to flag as offtopic, inapprpriate, copyvio, etc
  • need to figure out how/if/whrer to use wikidata.
  • note: needs some php work! backend and web front
  • glam needs?
  • Needs Image Info API work to be done!

Big picture strategizing

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  • Reader apps - do we go native?
    • Brion wants native reader apps!
    • Potentially merge commons app with native reader app(s)?
    • Want *real* interactive stuff in the 'reader' apps
    • DEFINITELY no more phonegap
    • Perhaps things like editing, etc going to web view (at least for now)
    • When do we do this?
      • Depends on Commons app schedule
      • No time currently for seriously focussing on this
      • Probably need 1/4 to get to feature parity with the existing phonegap app
    • Jared has more concerns about lack of parity between apps and web (eg facebook app vs facebook site is what we should strive for)
    • Juliusz conerend about duplicating efforts and work btwn web/app - why double the time to build the same features? Especially if new platforms come out that we need to build for
    • Yuvi - apps can be a great place for experimentation, since you'll get acces to more cutting edge features faster at the native level vs web
    • Currently many problems with webivew in general (particularly in android 2.3)
    • Timeline
      • Q1/Q2 - continue building out commons apps, particularly campaign functionality
      • Q3/Q4 - focus on rewriting existing Wikipedia reader apps for ios/android
    • Open question - how do microapps fit into the above timeline?
  • Mobile design... Minerva as a vehicle for change
    • desktop
    • tablets
    • phablets?!

Random notes

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  • mobile disambig link resolver.... hey that sounds handy. wuold also be handy to integrate into the link dialog in VE, let's share ideas?
  • add uploads to article easier.... with VE this should be easier to be flexible
    • (think about the app too; maybe use a webview ;)
  • category adder task
  • Tablets? STUFF TO THINK ABOUT!
  • Ratio of contribute-to-pageview for mobile is below desktop currently