Topic on Talk:Page Curation

Fetchcomms (talkcontribs)

Finally, an in-wiki program for patrollers. This is long overdue. A couple of questions:

  • Would it be difficult to adapt this for regular vandalism patrols, too? That would make Huggle essentially obsolete, but it'd be more convenient.
  • Is a mobile version of this planned or considered at this point?

I'm really liking this approach because it means everything can be done in a web browser rather than a separate application, and there's no need for sometimes buggy scripts or gadgets.

Jorm (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Two questions, two answers:

  • No. In fact, this is where I think we should go for all our curation tools.
  • Yes. In fact, the design is focused towards mobiles and tablets.
Kudpung (talkcontribs)

Two answers, two comments:

  • I agree that all tools should be available through the browser, that way there would be cross-platform compatibility and the users of OSX and Linux would not be denied the privileges of them.
  • I've lost count of the times when I have corrected a patrollers's tag and left a message on their tp, to get an answer on the lines of: "Yeah, I'm editing from my iPhone on the school bus." With all the other problems, is priority development time for mobile platforms absolutely essential?
WereSpielChequers (talkcontribs)

I'm a bit nervous about having this designed specifically for mobiles, especially before we find out the proportions of mobile and PC users among the patrollers.

Many of the opportunities to improve the process rely on using the screens and keyboards of PCs. If everything has to be mobile compatible then we risk losing some opportunities to really improve the process.

By all means make sure there is a mobile version, but please don't constrain the PC version to the same limitations. For example with a mobile version I would expect that rather than have a mix of patrolled unpatrolled and if we implement it other colours on the screen you would choose the colour stream and just surf through that.

Also I'm very worried that mobile editing might exacerbate the trend from improving articles to templating them, presumably it would be easier to look at an article on a mobile and choose the relevant template than it would be to actually improve the article?

I'm one of those who suspects that the rise of templating since 2007 is a cause of the decline in the community and the increase in snarkiness that has happened in the same period (though I appreciate there are some who see the two simultaneous phenomena as unrelated and coincidental). So I would be concerned about a new page patroller tool for mobiles that exacerbated the templating trend.

Steven (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Considering that it is hard to write substantial amounts of text on mobile/tablets, I think you're correct to be wary of creating more shallow kinds of participation in the new page patrol process. But I think there are ways we can engineer the interface to avoid templating and other kinds of impersonal interactions between people.

Kudpung (talkcontribs)

I've just done the mobile platform survey. FWIW, I don't use my smart phone much for Internet stuff, but from what I see, I believe it would be most inadvisable to even suggest that serious maintenance work by patrollers and admins should be carried out on one. See my true anecdote that I posted somewhere else about a patroller who was patrolling on his iPhone in the back of the school bus!

Viriditas (talkcontribs)

I've done project-related patrols from my iPhone while I was walking at a fast pace outside at night to get exercise and fresh air. Mobile is the future, and you'll eventually be able to connect to eyewear for a full screen effect or you'll be able to project the interface on a wall or flat surface. I'm surprised that anyone would even be against this.

Kudpung (talkcontribs)

At the current level of NPP, I believe it is unlikely that our patrollers would invest in such technology. As I've said before, I do not believe that walking down the street or sitting in the school bus are ideal places for doing concentrated serious maintenance work on the encyclopedia. I really feel that mobile solutions are a low priority here - most people probably do such work from the comfort of their home, office, or school computer room, using a desktop computer, or a laptop with a large screen. A survey on NPP that is due to be launched shortly may shed light on these issues.

Viriditas (talkcontribs)

I couldn't disagree more strongly. The desktop computer is dead in the water and will really only be used for hardware support, under the hood. On the frontend of human computer interaction, we will have gestural input in the air (Leap Motion), virtual retinal display (Google, Microsoft) touch screen tablets embedded into common surfaces (Microsoft Surface) and projection of virtual desktops from your cellphone on any flat surface (LG, Samsung, etc.) This is not science fiction, it is happening right now as I write this screed. As far as users, your comments about what people are doing and how they are doing it is far, far off the mark. Go outside. People are walking down the street and sitting on the bus working on tablet computers. The idea that people a year from now, will still be working primarily from their home, office, and computer room using a desktop computer is WRONG. We are slowly evolving into the pervasive computing paradigm. I can imagine, let's say a year from now, where page patrollers are decoupled from any desktop, with many having trouble understanding what a "desktop" is supposed to be. The page patroller of the future might have a pair of sunglasses on (during the day) which will alert him or her to any new pages or edits made to articles based on his location, giving us a pseudo-amateur-expert approach based on location aware patrolling features. This kind of decentralization of patrolling will distribute the crowd around the world and allow us to monitor topics in real time based on where we are at the moment. Continuing to think in terms of sitting down at a computer in front of a desktop is just ridiculous. Data will be delivered, not scanned, content will be entered with the help of virtual keyboards we can type in the air, not from a piece of plastic, and screens will appear everywhere, even embedded into the sleeves of our clothes. With the maturation of cloud computing services, it won't matter what device you use (and such arguments will seem peculiar in a few years) because the data will be pervasive; you will access it from all devices. Desktop computing is important to the future of Wikipedia in the same way that typewriters are important to the future of book publishing.

Jasper Deng (talkcontribs)

This is probably only possible with holographics. But I agree that if we could have virtual keyboards in the air, as well as virtual screens, we would no longer have the main drawbacks of smartphones and tablets.

Viriditas (talkcontribs)

It's possible now with tablets and Leap. Imagine page patrol in an app which allows side scrolling pages which can be pushed in either direction to browse the queue. People using this interface will have the ability to also "grab" a page and "toss" it in a cleanup queue, where other editors will pass it on or fix it. Now, imagine extending this interface in 3D. You could view the entire life cycle (timeline) of an article like a plant growing from a seed into a flower, and play around with branches and leaves of that plant to link disparate editors, related topics, etc.

Jasper Deng (talkcontribs)

That would be quite a lot of programming and engineering...

Viriditas (talkcontribs)

I don't think so; most of this stuff already exists, probably as open source. Is it WebKit that allows one to side scroll through web pages in Safari on the iPhone? Has anyone experimented with side scrolling features? This would make page patrol much easier and pave the way for gestural input.

Jasper Deng (talkcontribs)

While I disagree with Viriditas on mobile phone usage, this probably will have to be a mobile feature. If the WMF doesn't have one, a third-party dev. could make one.

Steven (WMF) (talkcontribs)

On this topic: the current beta of the New Page Feed works pretty well on mobile Safari on an iPad. I'd encourage anyone interested to give it a try.