Reading/Web/Projects/Barack Obama in under 15 seconds on 2G

The problem
If you have a 2G connection your Wikipedia experience is terribly slow. This leads to third parties transcoding our pages. We need to make this faster. This was highlighted as an issue back in 2012 but still hasn't been solved. It's time to fix that.

The how
The main issues are serving unnecessary content to mobile users that may not be used. This includes non-essential content and images. We believe by switching the mobile web site to Parsoid we will gain more control over the content we display to users. We believe we can initially serve just the HTML of the lead section and load the rest of the content, images included, via JavaScript, without ruining the existing experience for users who are fortunate enough to have a good connection. Switching to Parsoid will also allow us to create a more modern Wikipedia experience.

Success criteria

 * Barack Obama loads in under 15 seconds on a 2G connection
 * The content served initially has value (e.g. lead section)
 * First paint increases across the site (counter-intuitively due to more traffic from slower connections)
 * Overall page visits for site increase
 * Mobile web service does not deteriorate e.g. there is not an increase in outages
 * Bytes per page view drops for casual readers

Join the conversation
This task is being tracked on Phabricator and we'd love to hear your thoughts.