User:Jkatz (WMF)/sandbox/Q4proposal

Proposer
Maryana Pinchuk and Jon Katz, on behalf of the Mobile Web Team

Overview
Improve quick look up reader experience and bring exploratory projects to stable states. The mobile web team is looking to shift this quarter from spending nearly all of its resources on exploratory projects to a balance between solving known user problems for established use cases (65%) and exploring new use cases and features (35%). Similarly, having spent 2 quarters focusing on contributory mechanisms, we are looking to spend the bulk of our energy on readership features.

2 Streams:

Readership (mature use case): Quick look up improvements.
Over a third of our gobal traffic is going to the mobile web version of Wikimedia projects. The mobile web is serviceable, but it is not optimized for reading. The mobile app team has used its speed to experiment with optimized reader experiences. Given the growing population accessing our site via mobile web, and our ability to develop quickly on the mobile web, we should spend significant time to make some tactical improvements to make our MW experience better for our users. In doing so, we plan to take learnings from mobile app as starting points and passing learnings on to desktop.

Deliverables:

 * Achieve greater mobile design and UX parity: port visual improvements (top of article experience) from app to mobile web to support quick lookup
 * Increased search prominence, simplified header
 * Potential additional features for measuring effects on reader engagement: share-a-fact integration/upsell, find-in-page, 'read more' section

Contribution (exploratory use case): Curation and sharing
Last quarter we proved that users are interested in making casual contributions and that those contributions have the potential to be valuable. Given some external dependencies for the existing model, we would like to spend the next quarter stabilizing work on these two projects and figuring out the next contribution models to operationalize, rather than building out new ones.


 * WikiGrok: finish remaining aspects of the MVP workflow (return loop) to put it in a state where it can be picked up at a later date, when Wikidata backend/API/storage capabilities are more robust.
 * Gather: bring it to its MVP state in order to properly evaluate features that will inform product direction in a number of arenas.

Deliverables:

 * Taking Gather to its MVP: enhanced sharing capabilities at scale on Wikipedia.
 * Getting Wikigrok to 100%: releasing all campaigns in stable with WikiGrok game in sidebar to test stickiness/retention

The above user story is central to Wikipedia's existence. People look things up on Wikipedia to find out what they are every day. But the long, complex prose in the first sentences of Wikipedia articles make it difficult to find out what something is at a glance. On the other hand, Wikidata descriptions are short, simple, and factual definitions of what something is, but they are not exposed to readers. To address the above problem, the Mobile Apps Team developed and shipped the lead image feature (see image to the right). But many articles still don't have Wikidata descriptions in English, a problem which is even worse when you consider languages that are not English.

In Q4, the Mobile Apps Team will pilot a feature which will let logged in app users seamlessly edit Wikidata descriptions in-line from articles. The process should be no more complex than tapping an edit pencil, entering some text into a text box, and tapping save. We could even use automatically generated descriptions (like those offered by Magnus Manske's AutoDesc API) to give the user a place to start. This will allow motivated power readers to contribute descriptions, without even having to realise they're interacting with Wikidata. This quick win will allow us to fill out Wikidata descriptions more completely, so that looking something up on Wikipedia to find out what it is is even better than before, and will lay the groundwork for further experiments in mobile-appropriate contributions in the app.

Deliverables
The feature the team will commit to getting into production by the end of Q4 is:
 * Wikidata descriptions will be editable by logged in users on the Wikipedia app for iOS and Android
 * Top of article experience (minus banner images) ported from apps to mobile web
 * Gradual rollout of new search on mobile web to measure effectiveness
 * MVP of Gather released in production on mobile web

Success criteria
The metrics that will determine success is:

Resourcing requirements
The proposer of this project estimates that the following resources are the minimum required to achieve this goal:
 * 7 FTE engineers
 * 2 FTE product managers
 * 1 FTE scrum master
 * 1 FTE QA tester