User:Qgil-WMF/Old

w:User:Qgil

Working at Nokia as MeeGo advocate and interested in contributing to the Wikimedia projects on Mobile stuff. A first mission could be to push the development of a Qt Quick app for MeeGo and Symbian devices.

Below you have some mobile related topics that I'm cooking here before finding a better place for them.

= Mobile platforms =

Language support
The ability to read and write Wikimedia content is a first premise, critical for those languages using scripts with poor or no commercial support. Installing fonts and language packs can be trickier or even impossible in certain mobile platform. As a rule of thumb, cheaper devices have a more restricted expandability - and many times are those cheap devices the ones most commonly used by the speakers of those unsupported languages...

Language support includes many areas and actually some of the most demanding for a device vendor (e.g. all pre-installed apps localized in language XX) are not critical for Wikimedia projects. What really matters for us is:


 * Fonts supported in browser.
 * Possibility to install additional fonts.
 * Text input supported.
 * Possibility to install additional virtual keyboards.
 * Text prediction supported.
 * Possibility to install additional predicted languages.
 * Dictionaries supported.
 * Possibility to install additional dictionaries.

It would be useful to have a table showing the languages/fonts/keyboards supported and available as installable in different platforms - if it doesn't exist somewhere already. I can start searching the Nokia specific information, which would cover already a nice % of mobile users - especially in the territories where the less supported scripts are natively used.

Note that the data might get complicated. Some languages might be supported in a device purchased in Country X but then not available and not installable in the same model purchased in Country Y. Third parties may offer their own input methods, text prediction and dictionaries with a different set of languages supported.

Apps
Some lousy thoughts...

w:Help:Mobile_access shows an interesting table of no less than 36 Wikipedia based apps for the iPhone. Some excellent (like Wikihood, which is the one the friend that lent me an iPhone uses all the time, pretty cool), some probably less impressive. But *none* of them able to edit or (apparently) bring any significant contribution to the Wikimedia projects other than hits and traffic.

So, I believe that our future Qt app for Wikipedia should actually concentrate on what is more likely to benefit the Wikipedia project and what is also less likely that third party developers will focus on: contributions.

We need to have a prioritized list of simple features, implying one hand use and simple or no typing. A first attempt:


 * "Share this" like WikiNews does.
 * Watch an article - simple way to get readers progressively involved.
 * Patrol a new article - could be suggested by the app.
 * Geotag an article - maybe there is a way to offer suggestions.
 * Assess the relevance / importance of an article - app could suggest
 * Upload and embed a picture to a page - implementation might be tricky.
 * Add a comment in the discussion page - rather than applying templates directly.
 * Let SuggestBot to suggest me a mobile task - (with some fine tuning of the bot this could be a stand-alone mobile app in itself)
 * Spellchecking - highly automated, engine tbd.

Something against vandalism would be nice? Although the implementation might be tricky since there is not 100% automatic cure.

Same about categorization, notability and dead-end pages. Fixing them right is not simple and mobile, casual edits can cause more pain than healing.

More features could be extracted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_backlog

There is also low level hanging fruit in the Community Portal: learn more about Wikipedia, Things to do, RSS feed of The Signpost...

Out of Wikipedia, Wikinews feed + rating looks also like a perfect match.

I have more ideas, but I rather focus the scope and concentrate on the implementation of top 3 features to start with.