User:MHolloway (WMF)/Draft:Wiktionary definition popups in the Android app

Currently, as an experimental feature, users of the Wikipedia Beta app for Android have the ability to find definitions from Wiktionary for any highlighted word on English Wikipedia. This page details the objectives, current status, and obstacles for the feature.

Goals
The Wiktionary definition popup feature is intended to improve the user experience by making additional relevant information available to the user, and to promote the strategic goal of integrating content from other projects into Wikipedia.

Design
The goal is to present definitions to the user in a streamlined, easy-to-read format. Rather than presenting a Wiktionary page in its entirety, the definition popup presents a set of definitions parsed from the term's Wiktionary page in the mobile content service. The design takes inspiration from the definition lookup feature in the Amazon Kindle app for Android and the builtin definition lookup feature on iOS.

Current status
The feature is an experimental MVP and enabled only on English Wikipedia. Due to the time cost of expanding the feature to other languages (see Obstacles), further work on the feature is pending based on user engagement.

How to use
Highlight a word in any English Wikipedia article in the Android Beta app, and you'll see a floating context menu containing the options "copy," "define," and "share." Choose "define."

Obstacles
Wiktionary content is unstructured. Consequently, presenting a concise set of definitions in a popup requires parsing them from the page HTML. English Wiktionary has a layout guide which assisted in this for the current English-only implementation.

It appears that every Wiktionary has a unique layout, so adding support for additional languages will require adding custom parsing logic for each additional language we support. We'll need to measure user engagement with the feature in order to determine whether expending the time and effort to do this additional work is worthwhile.

If Wiktionaries began moving to a structured data model (by working with Wikidata, for example), that would greatly increase our ability to scale this feature; of course, that would be a very large undertaking in its own right.