Wikimedia Mobile engineering/Strategy/2013-2014 planning

The mobile department held an annual planning meeting to help define the way forward through the 2013-2014 fiscal year. This document contains notes taken during the meeting.

Original etherpad: http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/2012-2013-Annual-Planning-Mobile-Dept

Agenda

 * Intro and annual goals presented (30 mins) 1000-1030 [Maryana]
 * Goal: Unify department around annual goals
 * Persona analysis (30 mins) 1030-1100 [Maryana]
 * Goal: Develop firm understanding of the types of users for whom we will build features
 * Break (5 mins) 1100-1105
 * Goal: Find relief from tedium of meeting
 * High-level features brainstorming session (85 mins) 1105-1230 [Arthur]
 * Goal: Generate rich backlog of feature ideas/feature buckets that will help us achieve our 6k contributors goal
 * R36, R63, R64, R66 (remote friendly), collab areas available
 * Lunch (30 mins) 1230-1300
 * Goal: Stuff face
 * Big-picture strategizing (60 mins) 1300-1400 [Tomasz?]
 * Goal: Develop overarching strategy for achieving our second goal of $goal
 * Mobile apps/web cross-pollination 1400-?!
 * Get out of the office and use our tools! Play with the commons app, mobile web, etc. out in the wild.

Personas

 * Reader
 * Newly registered user (0 edits)
 * Newish user (1-10 edits, 1-5 uploads)
 * Watchlist user
 * Editor
 * Uploader
 * Commons power user (> 100 uploads)
 * Wikipedia power user (> 100 edits)

High level brainstorming feature buckets

 * categories (+sample images?)
 * CTAs
 * Article creation
 * WikiData Editing
 * Authentication

Micro-Contributions
+ Jared + Max +Monte +Kaldari


 * Dabsolver
 * Adding Geo-coordinates to articles/images
 * Correcting locations on existing articles
 * Matching foursquare locations to article names
 * Collaborate with Foursquare?
 * Trump geotagged images with higher quality ones
 * Images Actions
 * Flagging as inappropriate
 * Adding tags/categories
 * Rating images within categories
 * Rating on metrics of artistic, technical, educational
 * For automatic lead images for articles?
 * Hot or Not for images within categories (most representative for a place, thing, person, etc)
 * Firehose of new image with swipe gestures for triage (Up - ok, right - copyright, etc.)
 * "Rating/approving/reverting" contributions by IP users / Flag content
 * What is a mobile appropriate ammount of "change" to verify via mobile,
 * Diffs are within a sentence
 * Consider only taking action on down-voted "bad" edits
 * Can we test users to determine if someone is a "good reviewer" by showing them fake things to review
 * like on Stack Overflow/Quora/Foursquare: show them stuff that we already know to be good or bad
 * investigate Mechanical Turk interface to verify edits
 * How do you classify "wrongness" and at what granularity, e.g. is badly written, needs citations, photos, inappropriate.
 * Make New Page Triage tool mobile friendly
 * Text transcription from scanned Wikisource
 * Improve Wikidata Items with properties to wikidata items within specific categories like people, places, etc
 * Is this person alive?
 * What do they do?
 * Male/female/other
 * Rating search queries off-site to their target articles as a good match or not to improve article metadata
 * collaborate with Google?
 * Translation
 * based on knowledge of a particular user prompt the user to translate all or part of the article

Getting started (newbies) (R 36)
+ Vibha + Maryana + Jon +Adam +Dan


 * Post-registration: suggest a task [possibly contextual, based on what you read/have watched]
 * Left nav browse tasks & contribute - persistent link in the left nav for all registered users
 * Banners to registered users [taking them to contribute page, point them to edit button, features like Nearby]
 * Post-registration: takes user to home page w/ some stats about me and a CTA to contribute if I never have
 * Post-registration: fill out quick "what do you love?" survey (multiple choice) - we give you tasks based on this
 * Post-registration: make an edit to userspace/fill out profile to learn markup
 * Different post-registration experience depending on where you came from

Reverts (watchlist, history, RecentChanges Patrol) r66
+ Juliusz + Arthur + May + Howie

Personas for these
History
 * Reader: help them understand WP is written by people, that the content changes
 * Newish user/Newly registered: help them understand how WP works, introduce them to these features
 * WP Power user: help them get their Wikipedia on
 * Sane mobile view that a human can understand with smiley faces
 * simplified version -- includes the most important for information for a editors to make a decision as to whether they want to view diff
 * design this so new editors understand there are people behind the page
 * capture motion of articles, as well as individuals that contributed
 * Better entry point into history (from article)
 * Direct revert/thanks? (if information can support decision); see below for comments on reverting
 * Summaries (e.g., top editors, most reverted editors, etc.); most helpful edits (e.g., large changes that haven't been reverted)

Watchlist

 * Different filters
 * Same things as above (motion, people)

History and Watchlist

 * Friendly Reverting (e.g., ability to revert, but automatically leave a talk page message to user, "Hey, we appreciate your edit, but it was  reverted because there wasn't a citation. . .")
 * Unfriendly reverting (e.g., ability to warn/block user)
 * UX for reverting makes nice the path of least resistance
 * Thanking user for contribution

Problems to anticipate
Recent changes [WP power]
 * Reverting too easy, vandalism
 * Reverts not possible because of merge conflicts (how to deal with them, what kind of feedback/UI to provide)
 * Make into an app! AND a view on mobile web
 * Could really drive reversions and stuff

Diff

 * Better diff management -- fix UX (entry point is history, watchlist, recent changes, etc.)
 * Better way of viewing diffs that aren't next to each other (e.g.,
 * Be able to easily compare multiple and arbitrary revisions
 * Ability to view all changes from one editor (in succession)
 * How much has changed since last time I viewed page
 * Ability to
 * Improved diff view
 * Entry points into different actions

User contribs (related to all of this; my and other)

 * Contribs that doesn't suck

Upload Campaigns
[Tomasz] [YuviPanda] [Brion] (r64)
 * Plans starting so far - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Yuvipanda/Mobile_campaigns
 * Make a campaign for Nearby?
 * campaigns largely a funnel for new users -- let them know what sort of stuff to contribute
 * wiki loves monumets is a known funnel
 * wiki takes [city] projects are similar in needs, on smaller scale
 * decentralize campaign creation and maintenance -- currently restricted because theres no edit history etc
 * apps offline functionality -- easy to do fr baic campaigns; harder if we integrate geo search like wlm or nearby
 * campaign discovery: featured campaigns, active campaigns, [your interests?], keyword search, nearby
 * mixing with categories or wikidata?
 * gamification? leaderboards, showing activity, talk page
 * stats shouldnt be hard t generate; might need db tables to hold accumulated data. in the ext that supplies the info
 * need machine readable licenses!!!!!
 * triage: show a stream [per campaign, per cat, per user?] and have buttons to flag as offtopic, inapprpriate, copyvio, etc
 * need to figure out how/if/whrer to use wikidata.
 * note: needs some php work! backend and web front
 * glam needs?
 * Needs Image Info API work to be done!

Big picture strategizing

 * Reader apps - do we go native?
 * Brion wants native reader apps!
 * Potentially merge commons app with native reader app(s)?
 * Want *real* interactive stuff in the 'reader' apps
 * DEFINITELY no more phonegap
 * Perhaps things like editing, etc going to web view (at least for now)
 * When do we do this?
 * Depends on Commons app schedule
 * No time currently for seriously focussing on this
 * Probably need 1/4 to get to feature parity with the existing phonegap app
 * Jared has more concerns about lack of parity between apps and web (eg facebook app vs facebook site is what we should strive for)
 * Juliusz conerend about duplicating efforts and work btwn web/app - why double the time to build the same features? Especially if new platforms come out that we need to build for
 * Yuvi - apps can be a great place for experimentation, since you'll get acces to more cutting edge features faster at the native level vs web
 * Currently many problems with webivew in general (particularly in android 2.3)
 * Timeline
 * Q1/Q2 - continue building out commons apps, particularly campaign functionality
 * Q3/Q4 - focus on rewriting existing Wikipedia reader apps for ios/android
 * Open question - how do microapps fit into the above timeline?
 * Mobile design... Minerva as a vehicle for change
 * desktop
 * tablets
 * phablets?!

Random notes

 * mobile disambig link resolver.... hey that sounds handy. wuold also be handy to integrate into the link dialog in VE, let's share ideas?
 * add uploads to article easier.... with VE this should be easier to be flexible
 * (think about the app too; maybe use a webview ;)
 * category adder task
 * Tablets? STUFF TO THINK ABOUT!
 * Ratio of contribute-to-pageview for mobile is below desktop currently