Reading/Web/New page creation

[This page is a work in progress and subject to change]

Currently in MediaWiki red links are disabled by default. This is historically due to the fact that the original version of the mobile site did not have any editor interface. Now we have an editor interface we should reconsider our approach and aim towards enabling red links.

Currently you can enable red links by opting into the beta or alpha mode of the site via Special:MobileOptions. Note that new pages can be edited but you must navigate to the specific URL. The disabling of red links simply hides the route to that page.

Number of new pages
5810 pages have been created on mobile.

Via EventLogging and the MobileWebEditing schema, we currently have data that shows that 1680 pages have been created on all Wikimedia sites since December 12th (specifically timestamp 20131212232148) [1]. It's not clear what happened to those pages as the events do not log the page id of the new page that has been created. We may want to explore altering the schema to flag new pages created via mobile.

If we look at all the different revisions of the EventLogging schemas, we can add 1533 [2], 2561 [3], 30 [4], 6 [5] new page edits - meaning a total of 5810 new pages have so far been created on mobile

[1] select count(*) from MobileWebEditing_6637866 where event_action = 'success' and event_pageId = 0 [2] select count(*) from MobileWebEditing_6077315 where event_action = 'success' and event_pageId = 0 [3] select count(*) from MobileWebEditing_5644223 where event_action = 'success' and event_pageId = 0 [4] select count(*) from MobileWebEditing_5518026 where event_action = 'success' and event_pageId = 0 [6] select count(*) from MobileWebEditing_5454549 where event_action = 'success' and event_pageId = 0

Number of non-deleted new pages
80% of articles in the main namespace that were created between 10th January to 4th February on mobile were deleted. According to Special:NewPages on English Wikipedia 19 new pages from mobile in the main space have survived. All of these were created between 10th January to 4th February 2014. Significantly more have been created and not deleted in other namespaces.

During this same period 91 pages were created on mobile in the main namespace [1].

This means 80% were deleted. I'm not sure how this compares to desktop but it seems promising. Note that the audience of mobile beta/alpha differs drastically from the regular audience of the mobile site so this data should be taken with a pinch of salt in giving an idea of what kind of quality we can expect new pages to exhibit.

[1] select count(*) from MobileWebEditing_6637866 where event_action = 'success' and event_pageId = 0 and timestamp >= 20140110000000 and timestamp < 20140204000000 and wiki = 'enwiki' and event_namespace = 0

Steps to enabling red links

 * Add a configuration setting which enables red links for 3rd parties by default. Instead use Wikimedia config to specify this for the Wikimedia sites case.
 * Enable red links on all Wikimedia wikis
 * Note that enabling red links on Wikimedia sites once toggled may require a cache flush. Although serving pages from cache will not break anything - just some pages will have red links and some not for a period of 30 days.
 * Note there is no going back once red links are enabled for these reasons.
 * Note there is no going back once red links are enabled for these reasons.