Mobile web projects/status

Last update on: 2014-10-monthly

2013-06-02
We ended the fiscal year with experimental work on navigation, moving all contributory actions into their own nav and beginning to work towards a right drawer for Echo notifications. We also settled on an editing workflow that we hope to promote to stable next month.

2013-07-25
fund where are you

2013-07-monthly
This month, the mobile web team released a new contributory nav to all Wikimedia mobile sites, including the existing upload and watchlist star features, as well as an edit button. This means that editing (in the form of section-level markup editing) is now enabled on all mobile Wikimedia sites for logged in users. In beta, we began work on mobile notifications restyling, as well as guiders for first-time editors and uploaders.

2013-08-monthly
This month we continued to improve the mobile editing feature, monitoring and triaging bugs and expanding the feature show at the section level of articles. We also released the first iteration of mobile notifications to projects where Echo is enabled (English, French, Polish, Portuguese, Hungarian, and Swedish Wikipedia, as well as and Meta). In beta, we built a new notifications treatment to be released in later months and continued working on mobile talk pages.

2013-09-monthly
In September, we mostly focused on Tutorial A/B testing, Notifications overlay in Beta, and adding campaign tracking to MobileFrontend.

2013-10-monthly
The mobile web team has been focusing on a variety of new features, as well as running tests and gathering metrics on new and new-ish mobile editors. The team has also been working on general design enhancements to improve the user experience and make the look and feel consistent across all aspects of the mobile experience.

Feature highlights from the past month include: a better AbuseFilter support for mobile editing, early experimentation around integrating VisualEditor with MobileFrontend for tablets, client-side performance enhancements, the ability to 'thank' from the watchlist, and Captcha support for mobile editing.

In beta, 'Near this page' is now available, as well as user profiles and 'Keep Going' (a series of calls to action for new editors).

2013-11-monthly
The Onboarding A/B Test resulted in an Edit Guider, now available. The overlay UI overhaul currently in beta is planned to become available on the main site. User profiles intent is also in testing in beta.

2013-12-monthly
We've been working on finishing the redesign of the overlays. Additionally we've continued work on mobile on-boarding. The "Keep going" feature has been changed to a workflow that asks users to add blue links and includes a tutorial. This is consistent with what we've learned about how guiding users helps accomplish more edits, and it fits into more of micro contributory workflow that we want to experiment with. We've also worked on an A/B test displaying an edit guider for users signing up from the left nav menu. This is mirroring the edit guider that displays for users signing up through the edit call to action. It also is consistent with the behavior that the desktop site will be displaying to users as a result of the OB6 A/B test.

2014-01-monthly
<section begin="2014-01-monthly"/>We have been directing much of our attention over the last month at delivering a tablet-friendly MobileFrontend experience. We've added support for tables of contents in MobileFrontend for tablets, made some design improvements for tablets, and have worked towards making VisualEditor work with MobileFrontend for tablets (in alpha for now). We've hit some roadblocks and are hoping to collaborate more with the VE team in the near future to keep moving forward on the project. Following up from last month, we have also released our overlay UI improvements as well as an improved inline diff view for MobileFrontend into stable. Finally, we have also been working to expand our coverage of browser tests to facilitate quality assurance and help prevent the introduction of bugs and regressions.<section end="2014-01-monthly"/>

2014-02-monthly
<section begin="2014-02-monthly"/>We've been working on bringing VisualEditor to tablets (currently in alpha). This is a requirement for redirecting tablets to mobile later on. Specifically, we've been working on enabling inspectors, especially the link inspector. We've also been fixing a variety of bugs to ensure that the basic editing functionality works as expected.<section end="2014-02-monthly"/>

2014-03-monthly
<section begin="2014-03-monthly"/>The team worked on the link inspector for VisualEditor on tablets, and a switch between VisualEditor and wikitext on tablets. Both are in alpha.<section end="2014-03-monthly"/>

2014-04-monthly
<section begin="2014-04-monthly"/>This month, the mobile web team released history and contributions pages, as well as an updated watchlist view, for all users. We also promoted two new features geared toward "humanizing" Wikipedia for readers and new editors: a prominent "last modified" banner that indicates when articles haven't been edited in a while and may need some attention, and a user profile feature to provide a mobile-friendly snapshot of users' contributions and activity. For tablets, we updated typography and layout and worked on adding the ability to add and modify links via VisualEditor in beta, in preparation for redirecting tablets to the mobile site later this quarter.<section end="2014-04-monthly"/>

2014-05-monthly
<section begin="2014-05-monthly"/>This month the Mobile Web team continued to build out the basic features of VisualEditor for tablet users, providing the ability to add references via VisualEditor. We hope to finish refining the add and modify references workflow in preparation for graduating VE for tablets to the stable mobile site sometime in July. On the reader features side, we've pushed a number of tablet-related styling improvements (typography, spacing, and Table of Contents) to the stable mobile site. This should greatly improve the reading experience for tablet users who are already accessing the mobile version of our projects, and it is one of the last pieces of work we planned to get done before we begin redirecting all tablet users to the mobile site mid-June.<section end="2014-05-monthly"/>

2014-06-monthly
<section begin="2014-06-monthly"/>This month, the mobile web team finished work on styling the mobile site to provide a better experience for tablet users. We began redirecting users on tablets, who had previously been sent to the desktop version of all Wikimedia projects, to the new tablet-optimized mobile site on June 17. Our early data suggests that this change had a positive impact on new user signup and new editor activation numbers. We also continued work on VisualEditor features (the linking and citation dialogs) in preparation for releasing the option to edit via VisualEditor to tablet users in the next three months.<section end="2014-06-monthly"/>

2014-07-monthly
<section begin="2014-07-monthly"/>This month, the team continued to focus on wrapping up the collaboration with the Editing team to bring VisualEditor to tablet users on the mobile site. We also began working to design and prototype our first new Wikidata contribution stream, which we will build and test with users on the beta site in the coming month.<section end="2014-07-monthly"/>

2014-08-monthly
<section begin="2014-08-monthly"/>This month the mobile web team, in partnership with the Editing team, launched a mobile-friendly opt-in VisualEditor for users of the mobile site on tablets. Tablet users can now choose to switch from the default editing experience (wikitext editor) to a lightweight version of VE featuring some common formatting tools (bold and italic text, the ability to add/edit links and references). We also began building a Wikidata contribution game in alpha that will allow users to add metadata to the Wikidata database (to start, occupations of people) directly from the Wikipedia article where the information is contained. We hope to graduate this feature to the beta site next month to get more quantitative feedback on its usage and the quality of contributions.<section end="2014-08-monthly"/>

2014-09-monthly
<section begin="2014-09-monthly"/>This month the mobile web team focused on the first prototype of WikiGrok, a new contribution feature that asks users who are reading Wikipedia articles to help add Wikidata that is missing about the article subject. Over the course of the month, we built and user-tested the first experimental interface for allowing users to input Wikidata: a simple binary question mode that provides the user with a suggested occupation on biographies that are missing this information in Wikidata but contain a possible occupation in the Wikipedia article. In this early test phase we are storing the replies in a separate database, not pushing to Wikidata. We plan to add suggestions for more Wikidata fields and test this version against a slightly more complex tagging interface in beta in October.<section end="2014-09-monthly"/>

2014-10-monthly
<section begin="2014-10-monthly"/>This month the mobile web team created a new experimental interface for WikiGrok, a feature designed to provide an easy way to contribute structured data to Wikimedia projects. We are currently showing the two different versions of WikiGrok to readers and logged in users on the mobile beta site on English Wikipedia and gathering qualitative and quantitative data on engagement with the feature and quality of contributions. We also focused on backend integration to allow us to generate Wikidata questions on more articles, in preparation for testing at scale on the stable mobile site in the coming months.<section end="2014-10-monthly"/>