Wikimedia Apps/Team/iOS/Editing program

Updates
Friday, July 6, 2018 - Draft page posted, initial design research brief posted on Commons.

Introduction
As part of this year's Foundation goal of Growing our Contributors and Content, the Audiences department has initiated this program to understand, support and increase mobile contributions, particularly to the Wikipedias. Within this larger initiative the iOS team has been tasked specifically with Output 3.2.

The iOS team will begin development of contribution features of the app, starting with features that already exist in incomplete form, overlap with existing Readers features/needs, or otherwise are more easily adapted to mobile.

Given the scales involved, and the fact that most iOS users are in high awareness markets, it is unlikely this will increase overall rates of new contributor retention or more diverse content. It is necessary preliminary work, though, and foundational to more sophisticated interventions, which could follow and be adapted to the web when practical.

Participate
There are numerous ways to help us and provide feedback:


 * 1) Post on this Talk page!
 * 2) Become a beta tester by adding your name and preferred email here.
 * 3) Sign up to be a User Tester. User testers get to try very early versions of features and provide extensive feedback on usability and other issues.
 * 4) Join the mobile mailing list and send us an email.

Partner Wikis
In order to provide a manageable focus and develop the specialized editing and language community expertise, the iOS team will be focused on a subset of Wikipedias for this initial work on editing. Our planned partner wikis were selected based on a number of factors, largely based on the New Editors research project, and subsequent work on the editing Taxonomy. More about this preliminary research is below. We also believe these languages have enough iOS users and app users to make a reasonable place to start working with existing communities. Finally, we wanted to include one non-latin script based language, as this will help ensure our work can be brought to multiple writing systems in the future.

Our "primary" projects are:


 * English Wikipedia
 * Korean Wikipedia
 * France Wikipedia

If possible, we will also include two additional Wikipedias in each feature. However if supporting a feature in these languages would require significant cost or unique development, we will depriotize them in favor of the primary languages:


 * Hindi Wikipedia
 * Czech Wikipedia

Target Users
Although we strive to design features for all humans, in the scope of this project we have identified a type of editor that represents the "persona" of users we believe we are in the best position to support and delight. These users have one or more of the following attributes:


 * users who have edited 1 or more times
 * have interest/motivation to fix or improve existing pages (not create new pages or perform administrative functions)
 * own an iOS device and use apps regularly
 * users who have said "I'd use the app but its editing features suck" are particularly ideal

If you are not seeing yourself in this "persona" we still want to make editing easier and more productive for you on the iOS app, and we still would ask for your participation as outlined in the Participate section.

Goals
Our goal, in words, is easy to state: to make contributing to Wikimedia via the iOS app as good a user experience as we have made reading in the app. We will bring the same commitment to design, user testing and quality we have brought to Wikipedia's readers on iOS to deliver useful and delightful contribution features.

In more practical terms we need ot be able to measure whehter the improvements we're making are actually making contributing easier, more efficient and more engaging. We'll do that by looking for increases in two primary metrics, while also montioring to health metrics to ensure we are not damaging the overall health of the ecosystem or satisfaction of app contributors.

As a new project, measuring and reporting baseline numbers will be our first step in this area. A bit about each metric below.

Primary metrics
Total iOS app edit count - Keeping it simple, we hope to increase the total number of successful edits made via the iOS app.

Edits/Editor - As is hopefully clear from the above material, we really hope to make it much more effiecient and enjoybale for existing editors to do more via the app. This metric will measure that effeciency by looking at the number of successful edits per editor in the app.

Health monitoring metrics
Revert rate of iOS edits - it is not acceptable to purely increase the amount of edits from the app. If these edits are not constructive or do not conform to the local policies it is better not to have those edits at all. In order to ensure that we are not increasing the burden on existing communities or reducing the quality of the projects we will closely monitor revert rates for edits from the app. Although we expect some noise and fluctuation in this metric, it will need to remain roughly stable as we make changes.

Active or new Editor 2 month retention - We believe that by making editing more efficient, enjoyable and understandable we will naturally see editors returning to the app and editing on a repeat basis. We are not building features specifically to boost this number, but if we are seeing more edits, but unable to keep those editors engaged that will be a negative signal we will have to address.

Principles
The team generally works by defining a set of aspirations or principles and then evaluating our work, and user feedback, against those goals. You can see our principles for Readers here, as an example. This program will have the following initial principles:

Sources of Features
Roughly, as now, the team plans to do a major feature release each 2 months, followed by bug fix/iteration as needed.

The goal will be that each release will include one priority from each of the following theoretical backlogs:


 * 1) User: features driven by existing app editor requests and user research with existing editors matching our target user persona.
 * 2) Community:  features driven by curation or larger community feedback or needs. That is features based on editor needs, but editors across the target wikis, rather than the specific volunteers we are targeting.
 * 3) Research:  features recommended or identified by longer term design research. These are also user derived, but will be shared across the department and based on user-centered design processes. Initially this will consist of the mobile contribution taxonomy.
 * 4) Technology:  work to pay down tech debt, do required maintenance and support and participate in the platform evolution goal of the Foundation.

Initial features under consideration
Based on our initial research, and the Mobile Contribution taxonomy, and longstanding requests from English Wikipedia editors, the following features are under consideration and undergoing initial design and product evaluation. In some cases we've linked to existing Phabricator or project pages, but as we develop more focused plans for these specific features we'll continue to update this page with new links and sub-pages:


 * Find in page on the edit screen
 * User Talk basic support
 * Wikidata descriptions editing
 * Wikitext Keyboard
 * Improvements to mobile edit descriptions and edit filters
 * Tagging via template for page issues
 * Wikitext Syntax highlighting
 * Improved page history and visual diffs