On-wiki communication
The mobile interfaces of Wikipedia have varying levels of support for notice and talk features that are core to the healthy and effective participation of editors. This page documents the current state and the work of several teams at the Wikimedia Foundation to address these gaps.
This page provides a central, high-level, watchable page to track the progress of this work. As teams reach major milestones we’ll keep this page updated. The table on this page indicate a team’s understanding of how completely the issue has been addressed. "Yes" items are complete and the team(s) believes it has addressed the issue for all wikis. The table on this page are for tracking progress across languages and form factors. "No" items have not yet been completed, but many are in progress or being investigated. Other items are partially complete or have limited availability. If you believe an item should be given a different status please go to the individual Phabricator task or talk page to provide feedback on that specific issue, if they are linked.
Each team maintains individual project pages and Phabricator tasks for their work, and we consider those team documents to be the most direct way to stay updated on specific issues or platforms. The individual project pages or Phab tickets are also the best place to provide feedback or specific suggestions on individual features.
Overview[edit]
| Editor | Desktop | Mobile Web | iOS | Android | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (IP) | (User) | (IP) | (User) | (IP) | (User) | (IP) | (User) | |
| Tag | (none) | Mobile web edit | iOS app edit | Android app edit | ||||
| "New message" alert | Yes | Yes | Yes[1] | Looks like other alerts[2] | Yes | Yes | Partial[3] | Yes |
| Other alerts | N/A | Yes | N/A | Yes | N/A | Yes | N/A | Yes |
| Custom block messages | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No[4] | Partial[5] | Yes |
| Partial block shown as partial | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No[6] | Yes[7] | Yes[7] |
| Editnotices | Yes | Yes | Partial[8] | Partial[8] | No[9] | No[10] | Yes | Yes |
| Talk page banners | Yes | Yes | Hidden behind tiny link[11] | Hidden behind tiny link[11] | Yes | Yes[12] | Yes[13] | Yes[13] |
| Custom edit filter messages | Yes | Yes | Partial[14] | Partial[14] | Partial[15] | Partial[16] | Yes[17] | Yes[17] |
This table has been copied and adapted from w:en:Wikipedia:Mobile communication bugs, which provided a very good overview. Thanks especially to Suffusion of Yellow for their documentation work.
Related pages[edit]
WikiCommunication offers an overview of what the Wikimedia Foundation's Product Department is doing in to improve communication between volunteers using MediaWiki talk pages.
The Android team has a project page for communication and the iOS team a project page for notifications, as well as a page for Talk support under development.
Talk pages project offers an overview of the suite of improvements the Editing Team is making to talk pages on the mobile and desktop site. To see the features available at any given wiki, visit Talk pages project/Deployment Status.
The Moderator Tools team is working on content moderation tools for mobile web which could include some work on communication aspects such as edit notices.
Notes[edit]
- ↑ Mobile web has a caching bug affecting IP user talk pages, phab:T295910: Yellow talk page message banner appearing inconsistently on edit page.
- ↑ Regarding mobile web's user talk page alerts, see phab:T240976.
- ↑ On Android, if a user has on push notifications there is a distinction on the lock screen and an ability for people to reply via lock screen (T288538). We've implemented in-app notifications on each screen with a red dot indicator, once a user opens it, they will see a distinction between "mentions" and all notifications. Mentions are any alert prompted by another human (reverts, talk page messages, etc.). The team is open to making Mentions the default tab (T288064).
- ↑ iOS does not display block notices. The design and tech leads are investigating the Android practical solution from earlier this year to see how it could be adapted for iOS. We expect this to be part of the release following Echo notifications.
- ↑ See phab:T276149: Android application sometimes falsely claims that a user account is blocked. In 2021 the team worked on updates to how we display custom block messages. We've made updates as much as we can without backend bandwidth, we are open to adding a step in the workflow that encourages IP editors to login after receiving block messages (project page update).
- ↑ iOS app is unable to show partial blocks as partial, because of upstream limitations.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Android app currently implements notices about partial blocks by rendering a separate notice explaining that they are "blocked from editing the specific page but can edit other pages".
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Mobile web's abence of edit notices on talk page (T201595) has been partially addressed through the introduction of the mobile New Topic Tool which shows people edit notices when attempting to start a new topic on a talk page (T269033). The Editing Team does not currently have plans to revise how edit notices appear within either of the mobile full-page editing interfaces.
- ↑ iOS app does not present edit notices (phab:T201596).
- ↑ iOS team are planning to adopt the same solution developed by the Android team.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Mobile web's display of talk page banners will be improved by the Editing Team as part of Talk pages project/Mobile. See T312309 for more information.
- ↑ iOS app displays talk page banners, as it renders talk page contents in full. Special formatting is not applied to the banners, and the full contents of the message is shown in the User:Talk feature. In future versions we work on making User:Talk more prominent and integrated into the navigation of the app.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 Android app renders talk page banners now (T291411).
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 Mobile web's display of edit filter messages is considered "partial", because the full-page talk page editing interfaces do not show custom edit filter messages. The mobile Reply Tool and New Topic Tool both show custom edit filter messages (see: T281544#7716190).
- ↑ On iOS, IP users see the name of the page but not the message it contains.
- ↑ Regarding iOS design and tech leads are investigating the Android partical solution from earlier this year to see how it could be adapted for iOS. We expect this to be part of the release following Echo notifications.
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 Android application does not display custom AbuseFilter messages (phab:T276139). Links in the message open in the browser, and sometimes go to the wrong language wiki