User:CKoerner (WMF)/Reading List Discussion

Discussion on synced reading lists
The Reading Infrastructure team at the Wikimedia Foundation is developing a cross-platform reading list service. This service will allow users of the mobile Wikipedia app (currently Android and Apple iOS) to create reading lists of Wikipedia content. Reading lists allow readers and contributors alike to bookmark pages into folders for reading later, including offline.

Because this is the first time we are syncing non-editor or preference data to a user account we want make sure concerns about privacy and data security are heard and addressed. We also want to take this opportunity to explain why the current watchlist system is not being adapted for this purpose.

Background
In 2016 the Android team replaced the simple Saved Pages feature with Reading Lists. Reading Lists allow users to bookmark pages into folders for reading offline or just for basic bookmarking. This feature initially was intended to allow "syncing" of these lists for users with multiple devices, or even users who want access to these lists across their interactions with Wikipedia (across apps and web). Due to overlap with the Gather feature and related community concerns, this part was put on hold.

The Android team has identified this lack of synching as a major area of complaint from users (they expect lists to sync) and the iOS team has held off implementing Reading Lists, as syncing was seen as a "must have" for this feature. A recent technical RfC paved the way for these user stories/needs to be unblocked, initially for Android, then iOS, and with web to potentially follow.

Reading lists are private, stored as part of a user's account, not as a public wiki page. There is no sharing or publishing ability for reading lists, and none is planned. The target audience are people that read a lot of Wikipedia content and want to bookmark and organize that content in the app (and eventually web).

Why not Watchlist
Watchlists offer similar functionality and the watchlist infrastructure was evaluated before exploring other options. In general, the needs of watchlists differ from Reading Lists in a few key ways:


 * Reading lists are focused on Reading articles, not the monitoring of changes.
 * Watchlists are squarely focused on monitoring changes of pages/revisions. The Watchlist infrastructure is key to our editor community for monitoring content changes both manually and through the use of bots. Because of these needs, expanding the scope of Watchlists to reading purposes will only make the project harder to maintain and add additional constraints.
 * By keeping the projects separate, it is easier to scale resources to serve these two different audiences and prioritize the work accordingly. Reading Lists are, by their nature, less critical to the health of Wikipedia/MediaWiki.
 * Multi-project support. Reading Lists are by nature cross-wiki/project. Watchlists are scoped to specific wikis. While making them cross-wiki has been discussed for a while, resolution is not in the near term.

More information can be found on MediaWiki.org where feedback and ideas are welcome.

Thank you ~ ~ ~ ~