Topic on Talk:Reading/Readers contributions via Android/Outcome

Abstract:

• give more tools for users to edit mobile views for Main page or wikiprojets
• edit Wikidata descriptions en masse

One feature that Wikia has developed is the Mobile Main Page. It allows admins to change the default mobile view of the main page by changing the featured pages and content.

Advantages

• Design pages for the task - a mobile page for mobile users and a desktop page for desktop like tools
• No wikitext - The mobile main page can be completed edited without any knowledge of wikitext
• Mobile compatible
• Mobile editable - it can be completely edited using mobile devices without wikitext markup
• Pages automatically populated pages from categories
• Cropping tool

Disadvantages

• Some loss of control - apart from user selected pages the tool essentially shows other content based on how trendy they are
• No custom interface - mobile sites don't allow any css or js changes

The tool shows how some of the ideas here could be implemented without relying on too much markup or complicated interfaces. It even allows selecting a page image and description for each featured item.

Demo: http://khanacademy.wikia.com/wiki/Khan_Academy_Wiki?useskin=wikiamobile

Thank you for this suggestion. I'm however afraid it is not in the scope of the current outcome.

Plus, I'm not sure to understand the final goal of this Mobile Main page you are suggestions. Can you clarify? Every Home page for Wikipedia shows the article of the day, and various other resources that a quite common across the languages. I think the reasonable idea would be to unify more all Wikipedia Mobile Main pages. What do you think?

The suggestion is not to use the mobile main page as wikia as done it, but merely to evaluate what concepts could be reused from it.

Some ideas :

• Change description and page image - wikimedia has deployed article descriptions in the mobile apps, yet there is no way to change the page image at the same time.
• Change multiple page images - instead of one by one for related pages.
• Changing related page descriptions - if someone is reading an article about the Thomas edison they may be interested in Nikolas tesla, and improve both descriptions or images.

That wikia tool allows changing or adding both at the same time although it relates to only the main page, the idea would be extending the concept of editing multiple page properties (e.g. description, image, etc) at the same time.

> I think the reasonable idea would be to unify more all Wikipedia Mobile Main pages. What do you think?

That would be hard. The main page tends to be the most viewed page in a site, any changes to it would be very controversial.

> Change description and page image - wikimedia has deployed article descriptions in the mobile apps, yet there is no way to change the page image at the same time.

This is a work in progress : Wikidata centralize the main picture and the description of any Wikipedia article, and there is a beta feature in the Android app in some language to edit the descriptions (images are a more complicated issue, mostly due to copyright).

> Change multiple page images - instead of one by one for related pages.

You mean a way to edit the description for one image that will have impact on all pages where this image is used?

> Changing related page descriptions - if someone is reading an article about the Thomas edison they may be interested in Nikolas tesla, and improve both descriptions or images.

I don't get this one.

> That would be hard. The main page tends to be the most viewed page in a site, any changes to it would be very controversial.

I'm not sure. All pages have the same way to work: article of the day, events, image of the day... At the moment, the Main page on mobile is using these resources to display contents. Improve this, to give the best information, is not controversial. It can be controversial if a community wants to have titles in green and don't have a way to do so. :)

>  Changing related page descriptions - if someone is reading an article about the Thomas edison they may be interested in Nikolas tesla, and improve both descriptions or images.

>> don't get this one

In that tool you can edit multiple items (both images and text) at the same time. The current wikidata descriptions, apply to a single page. For example:

"Thomas edison" - Description: Famous Inventor of the light bulb ; Image : Thomas.png

"Nikolas tesla" - Description: Famous Inventor of the tesla and wireless telegraphy ; Tesla.png

Currrently changing those those two would require going to two separate pages, either on wikidata or wiki. So it essentially decides all the items that will be displayed without leaving one page.

> Change multiple page images - instead of one by one for related pages.

>> You mean a way to edit the description for one image that will have impact on all pages where this image is used?

That's more like a job for structured multimedia data, but that could indeed be one way to implement it, with appropriate local changes as needed.

>  At the moment, the Main page on mobile is using these resources to display contents. 

Probably only the bigger wikis use this, and it is also unstructured at the moment and using a mix of templates and wikitext to make it work.

To write a description, you need some context. If you just have a title and an image, it will be difficult, no? I think that's why image description or just descriptions are not included in the WIkidata Games.

> Probably only the bigger wikis use this, and it is also unstructured at the moment and using a mix of templates and wikitext to make it work.

Correct, but most wikis I have visited have been inspired by a bigger ones, and use templates that are quite similar. Anyway, have a way or another to edit the home page on a mobile will need some community questioning, which is not a priority as far as I know.

>To write a description, you need some context. If you just have a title and an image, it will be difficult, no? I think that's why image description or just descriptions are not included in the WIkidata Games.

It depends on the topic, most kindergarden kids can already name and describe hundreds of objects and animals without reading the whole article about it. Adults know more although offering a preview of the article like with hovercards will eliminate that problem. I think that the android app already offers a hovercard like tool anyway.

So it will still be a useful tool it can be used to help finish up the description of articles and confirm any images related to the topic.

The work they put into add description probably made it easier to add images simultaneously.