Wikimedia Mobile engineering
From MediaWiki.org
- For a user friendly explanation of our mobile efforts, see Mobile projects.
The Wikimedia Foundation Mobile and Special Projects engineering team is managed by Tomasz Finc and is part of the larger Wikimedia Engineering team. The best way to keep up to date with the team is to check its roadmap or the project updates below. Feel free to take a look at our 2012/2013 goals to see where we're headed.
Current projects [edit]
| Project | Description | Project lead & team | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Commons App |
[edit]
An iOS and Android app that allows you to upload media to Commons. |
[edit]
Tomasz Finc, Brion, Yuvi, Shankar |
Status: (2013-04-monthly)
The Wikimedia Commons Android app is available in the Google Play store, and we also added categorization support. Its iOS counterpart is available in iTunes.
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| Wikipedia Zero |
[edit]
Free and zero rated access to Wikipedia through our partners |
[edit]
Tomasz Finc (Engineering); Kul Wadhwa, (Partnerships), Amit Kapoor, Dan Foy, Brion Vibber |
Status: (2013-04-monthly)
We deployed Mobile Web's MobileFrontEnd-ZeroRatedMobileAccess decoupling code to production. We also started the next point release to support more object-friendly JSON-backed carrier preferences, updated carrier preferences, fixed UI button rendering bug, and documented configuration parameters. Last, we added content to wiki pages, and prepared for the migration of non-embargoed content to public wikis.
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| OpenStreetMap |
[edit]
All things related to OpenStreetMap, Wikimedia, and mobile |
[edit]
Tomasz Finc, |
Status: (2013-03-monthly)
Max Semenik, Arthur Richards and Faidon Liambotis held an OSM mini-hackathon at Open Source Days 2013 in Copenhagen. During the event, they agreed on an implementation strategy for the WMF mapping cluster.
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| Mobile Web Photo Upload |
[edit]
A simple mechanism for users to upload photos from mobile devices, either directly to Commons or via a Wikipedia article or other front-end to Commons |
[edit]
Maryana, Jon, Juliusz, Max & Arthur |
Status: (2013-04-monthly)
In April, we experimented with a login/signup call to action for logged-out users from our in-article upload feature. This resulted in a huge spike in new user contributions; however, the quality of the uploads was lower than anticipated, and the quantity of inappropriate uploads was a burden on the Commons community. In light of this, we disabled the login/signup call to action, allowing only existing Wikimedians to see and use the upload feature. We are still on target to reaching our fiscal year target of 1,000 unique uploaders a month and, when gated to existing users, the quality of the uploads has vastly improved: 3/4th of the files are retained on Commons, as compared to less than 1/4 when brand-new users were uploading. To create a more focused uploading workflow and let mobile uploaders discover more articles to illustrate, we also created a Nearby view on the beta site, showing users a list of articles near them and highlighting the ones that need images. We expect to release this to the full mobile web site next month.
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On Hold [edit]
| Project | Description | Project lead & team | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mobile support in MediaWiki core |
[edit]
Building native mobile-device support in MediaWiki by porting critical components of Extension:MobileFrontend to core and building additional functionality as needed. |
[edit]
Tomasz Finc, Arthur Richards, Patrick Reilly, Max Semenik |
Status: (2012-06-monthly)
This project was mostly on hold.
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| Mobile default for sister projects |
[edit]
Migrating our sister projects to default to their own mobile interfaces |
[edit]
Tomasz Finc, Arthur, Patrick, Asher |
Status: (2012-07-monthly)
Patrick and Arthur added three new projects and one new domain to be mobile default. Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and *.wikimedia.org are now equipped to better serve our mobile users. The development team is eager to hear back from our community about what they would like to see from their projects on mobile. Our last project to migrate will be commons after which we'll close this project.
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| Wikipedia over SMS & USSD |
[edit]
Accessing Wikipedia over SMS & USSD using Vumi |
[edit]
Dan Foy, Patrick Reilly, Max Semenik |
Status: (2013-01-monthly)
We are finishing work on capturing the metrics from the SMS server to learn usage numbers and determine how many sessions are completed.
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Recently completed projects [edit]
| Project | Description | Project lead & team | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mobile Nav |
[edit]
A design for optimizing the experience of Wikipedia on mobile devices, in particular within a mobile web browser |
[edit]
Tomasz Finc, Patrick Reilly, Phil Chang, Brandon Harris, Heather Walls, Brion Vibber, Yuvi Panda, Jon Robson, Lindsey Smith |
Status: (2012-11-monthly)
Sumana Harihareswara started sharing new volunteer coordination tasks with Quim Gil, the new technical contributor coordinator who started working with the Wikimedia foundation in November. They continued to follow up on contacts (such as those gained at October's Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing), recruit new contributors to the Wikimedia tech community, and mentor newer contributors. The weekly online tech chats continued on Thursdays. Sumana and others continued to grant developer access and work on Gerrit project ownership requests.
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| Wiki Loves Monuments App |
[edit]
A mobile app dedicated to Wiki Loves Monuments, targeting the WLM contest in September 2012 |
[edit]
Tomasz Finc, Brion Vibber, Yuvi Panda, Arthur Richards, Phil Chang, Lindsey Smith |
Status: (2012-10-monthly)
The mobile team started planning the decommission of the WLM Android app. We'll be retiring both the app and the back-end infrastructure. During the decommissioning process, our product team will analyze data from the WLM contest and prepare for Commons upload next.
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| Mobile Contact us |
[edit]
A revised contact us form aimed at mobile devices |
[edit]
Tomasz Finc & Phil Chang, Arthur Richrds & Jon Robson |
Status: (2012-08-23)
237)75 65 82 92
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| Wikimedia Apps |
[edit]
Wikimedia Mobile Applications for iOS, Android, and new platforms |
[edit]
Tomasz Finc, Yuvi Panda, Jon Robson, Phil Chang & Brion Vibber |
Status: (2013-02-01)
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| Mobile Frontend |
[edit]
A PHP extension providing a mobile view for any MediaWiki site |
[edit]
Tomasz Finc, Patrick Reilly, Phil Chang |
Status: (2012-05-03)
We'll no longer be updating this project as all general work on MobileFrontend is complete. All further activity will be in sub project pages like our core migration
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| UCOSP Spring 2012: Wiktionary mobile app |
[edit]
Students work on a Wiktionary app for mobile phones. |
[edit]
Dlemieux, Pfhayes, Shea clare, & Tonyc, Tomasz Finc, Yuvi Panda, Sumana Harihareswara, & Amgine |
Status: (2012-06-25)
The app is now live in Google Play
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| 2011 Wikimedia fundraiser |
[edit]
Engineering support and development for the 2011 fundraiser of the Wikimedia Foundation |
[edit]
Tomasz Finc, Arthur Richards, Ryan Kaldari, Katie Horn, James Alexander, Jeff Green, Jeremy Postlethwaite |
Status: (2012-01-31)
After meeting the budget goals, the 2011 Fundraiser was wrapped up in early January, after which the team participated in a two-day retrospective. Work began on the Fundraiser 2011 cleanup, including the addition of recurring donation and auditing support for GlobalCollect. A two-day inception was held for preliminary planning of the 2012 Fundraiser.
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| Improved Mobile Device Detection |
[edit]
Work with the Apache Device Map project to provide a rich set data set of mobile UA's |
[edit]
Tomasz Finc, Patrick, Tomasz, Diederik |
Status: (2012-08-16)
Project is committed in repo and ready for testing needs work to be able to be used on our cluster. Closing out this project as we've wrapped up dev.
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| J2ME App |
[edit]
An app designed for use on features phones (primarily Nokia Series 40) that enables efficient reading of Wikipedia |
[edit]
Tomasz Finc, Patrick Reilly, Phil Chang |
Status: (2013-01-monthly)
During January, we've begun to explore ways to reduce the memory and processor requirements of our J2ME app, to increase the number of phones that can use this application.
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| GeoData Storage & API |
[edit]
An extension that allows you to store, retrieve, and quickly query GPS related information from MediaWiki |
[edit]
Tomasz Finc, Max Semenik |
Status: (2013-01-monthly)
After its soft launch in December, GeoData was officially announced this month. Work on improvements and bug fixing continues. The Special:Nearby page, which has been deployed to an experimental version of the site, represents the first major use of this feature on mobile projects. We hope to use it to help contributors identify articles in need of photos.
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| Mobile QA |
[edit]
Creating a QA infrastructure for all of our mobile efforts |
[edit]
Tomasz Finc |
Status: (2013-01-monthly)
The push to get MobileFrontend up and running on Beta Labs is well underway. We've also added test cases for Wikipedia Zero and we are planning a community test event for Mobile Upload and Commons in February.
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