Wikimedia Apps/Team/iOS/Archive/Notifications

What is the ultimate goal/vision for this project?
What if just by looking down you could read what Wikipedia says about the place you are standing? What if readers learned about a major world event on your tablet over you morning coffee from a free neutral source, with a transparent curation history and no transit through Apple or Google’s servers. What if each time a new POTD is selected on commons, or the featured article on en, hundred of thousands of people get excited and start reading the work of dedicated, amazing editors and photographers…

What is the short term goal/need for this project?
Pilot initial notifications with beta users or a/b test by the end of Q1 2016/17, fulfilling our team's quarterly goal.

Why are we doing this?
Notifications are a standard part of apps of all kinds. Even many reference apps have some form of notification (the Dictionary.com apps have Word of the Day, for example). In a world where attention is determined not just by a web search engine, but by what appears on the lock screen of your phone, notifications may be a vital way stay visible and accessible, and to continue to provide a viable alternative to commercial, closed, sources of information. Wikipedia’s role as fact-checker and deep dive source for news content was recently highlighted by a study from the Knight foundation and the Foundation's own analysis of the impact of Prince’s death on wiki and on social media. Wikipedia is a go-to source of information in times of high demand for reference material on specific people, places or events. Notifications and widgets provide a way to channel that interest directly to Wikipedia, bypassing the need for aggregators or search engines.

How do we know we’ve been successful?
Notifications are a dangerous feature. The last thing we want to do is interrupt or annoy readers — we can easily avoid this, since we do not have a profit motive or leadership dictate to push this on users. This means we will have a long development process for this feature, including more on wiki talk on the affected Special pages, design research and development iteration before even beta testing.
 * Increased medium and long term (D3 - D30) retention (target TBD, prolly have a target specific to users who opt into notifications)
 * "Good" click through rates on notifications, good opt in rates on widget/pushes ("good" TBD)
 * Overall positive design research results
 * Overall positive app store and OTRS comments

Privacy and Data Flow
Many people may be concerned about privacy with notifications, and some users have a very negative perception of push notifications in particular. Often notifications seem like the result of creepily knowledgable centralized user profiles, or are distributed via backend servers provided by the platform (ie. Apple or Google). However both major mobile platforms provide a way for the app itself to “send” the notification, without need for contacting the platform owner's servers or storing their choices on our servers. This means user's notification preferences and history are no different, from a privacy and data ownership perspective, than their in-app reading history.

Previous Work
In late 2015, Jon Robson created a working notifications system for Wikipedia content and activity in browsers based on the proposed W3C Notifications API standard. Running on Labs, and featuring many of the same content from the iOS Explore feed, this provides an example of the potential for notifications about Wikipedia. Sign up here to begin receiving notifications in Chrome or Firefox.

Initial product principles

 * Opt-in only, no central broadcast or distribution
 * Not reliant on 3rd party infrastructure (only network transit is encrypted requests for content from Wikimedia servers)
 * Subject to our privacy and license terms and policies
 * Transparent triggers (no black box algorithms, clear explanation of when/why notifications will be sent)
 * On-wiki content and curation
 * Main and Special pages
 * geotags
 * reading/editing behavior APIs (Pageviews and Recent changes)
 * Wikidata

Featured Article
Stories: Curation: Featured article from the project’s main page
 * 1) educated non-fiction lover likes to queue up interesting things based on content notifications (sports, news) for commute with no wifi
 * 2) loves the featured articles in his own language, so like knowing when a new one has been posted right on his phone, save for later

Triggers:
 * when new FA posted
 * at user selected time

Today in History
Stories: Curation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Selected_anniversaries
 * 1) history buff, can’t stand social media notifications or messaging, but likes to start his day with a set of notifications from reference/education apps
 * 2) science nerd girl who learns about hedy lamar from seeing her event on timeline

Triggers:
 * at user selected time
 * on update of Main page section on en

Commons Picture-of-the-day
Stories: Curation: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_day
 * 1) loves to see the beatiful pictures appreciates theirs no ads, likes to save and share the best ones with his friend
 * 2) commons contributor who loves to see what is picked each day, and makes it his lock screen if its particularly cool

Triggers:
 * on update
 * at user selected time

In the News
Stories: Curation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
 * 1) She knew he died, but seeing him on In the news makes a woman in Interested interested in why did people admired Muhammad Ali, saves it for later and learn more about him
 * 2) man learns about election results in his ancestral homeland because of Wikipedia's global scope. catches up on the latest events and really appreciates the NPOV, uses references links to find new news sources for current events in his home country he didn’t know about.

Triggers:
 * on update (i.e. watch list)
 * on user selected time if available
 * on page views spike
 * on edit rate spike
 * on social media mentions?

Nearby
Stories: Curation: Wikipedia Geodata API and Wikidata
 * 1) Saved pages “tour”
 * 2) learning something new about a place near your train station (page views trigger)

Triggers:
 * near location of a saved page
 * near a location whose closest geotagged article meets a page views threshold (top % of page views in language?)
 * near a location whose closest geotagged article meets an article quality threshold (only Good or Feature quality?)
 * near a location whose closest geotagged article matches on user selected properties (“monument”,”museum”,”train station”)

Trending
Potentital stories:
 * 1) learning something is happening you otherwise would not have.. [INCOMPLETE]
 * 2) Young person reads that th terrorist attacks in paris is being heavily edited,...  [INCOMPLETE]
 * 3) guy likes to be in the know in pop culture discussions and likes to use Wikipedia's trending to get the background on the latest.  [INCOMPLETE]

Curation: pageviews API, edit rates

Triggers:
 * time/date
 * as soon as available
 * page view threashold

Saved Pages Changes
[AKA LOCAL WATCHLIST]Potentital stories:
 * 1) saved a news topic [INCOMPLETE]

Curation: user

Triggers: a page saved locally has an edit or threshold count of edits

Potential Widgets
Today Widgets are based on Apple's “Extensions” technology, and allow us to provide access to Wikipedia in the OS layer. This connects us more deeply with power users, and ensures that we control curation, privacy and code, rather than ceding that space to Apple or a private competitor.

Nearby
Stories: Curation: geodata API, Pageviews API and wikidata
 * 1) Waiting to meet a friend in a cafe in paris and learning about a place near you from your home screen, switching between english and french to improve your french
 * 2) Learning something new about a place near your train station (use page views trigger)

Trending
Stories: Curation: page views API, edit rate
 * 1) Likes to see what people are interested in/reading about in spanish, living in the US, keeps him connected
 * 2) Trusts wikipedia more than the news, likes to hear it first directly from the wiki

Today in History
Stories: Curation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Selected_anniversaries
 * 1) history buff on vacation, reading Today on iPad lock screen by the fire, finding an event that interests
 * 2) looking at the calendar on the today screen, sees someone famous shares my moms birthday today, and it turns out they went to the same school, I wonder if she knew that, I’ll send her this article

Commons POTD
Stories: Curation: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_day
 * 1) middle aged woman in europe  appreciates seeing a beautiful photo in her today screen everyday without being tracked or registering for anything
 * 2) Father likes to check out the picture each day as he checks his stocks and score, and share the best battleship pictures with his son, who shares his love of marine history

In the News
Stories: Curation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
 * 1) news junkie wakes up and reaches for his phone and reading Today on phone when he wakes up, appreciates that Wikipedia's content is non-commercial, global and neutral
 * 2) User in India likes having wiki in with his other info sources on the Today screen because its less US politics focus and less sensational than many international news sources

Batteries Not Included
Central Notice or other broadcast mechanism

Echo notifications