Talk:Contributors/Mobile Web Editing Research

Improving the Mobile Editing Experience (on web)

The Wikimedia Foundation Contributor team is planning future improvements, and we would like to hear directly from mobile editors. What aspects of editing on mobile do you find frustrating or difficult? Are there particular challenges or bugs you encounter? How could we make editing on mobile easier and more enjoyable, especially for people who are editing for the first time? KStoller-WMF (talk) 21:22, 31 August 2025 (UTC)

Hello @KStoller-WMF, thanks for your questions!

1. Not support sustained editing: The browser will easily refresh without any notice and cause the loss of edits. It is quite frustrating for all users, whether experienced or new, and whether making minor or significant changes. There should be a stable auto-save function to prevent any sudden refresh or closing of the browser.
2. Interactive tutorials: Wikitext and the format of Wikipedia are challenging for newcomers, especially since it is a bit difficult to modify content and correct the format on a phone's narrow screen. It would be nice if there were interactive tutorials to help newcomers learn Wikipedia easily, so they don't need to spend much time on formatting.
3. Unclear block messages: Users will not know the reason and information for a block if they are affected by multiple blocks (e.g., proxy block on both local and global). They don't have any ideas on how to resolve the issues. It just makes them frustrated and finally gives up editing. (FYI: the relevant ticket)

SCP-2000 (talk) 16:05, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for the feedback, @SCP-2000!

1. Great point. This is one of my main recommendations as well. From what I understand, we could explore extending Help:Edit Recovery to work on mobile / Minerva. Do you think that would address the issue?
2. I also agree that interactive tutorials can make learning more engaging, especially when designed to be mobile-friendly. The Growth team is currently testing a similar approach for the Revise Tone Structured Task. Instead of lengthy, document-style onboarding, we are experimenting with an interactive quiz to help teach the basics of encyclopedic tone.
3. Blocks remain a major challenge for mobile users. On wikis with Temporary Accounts, there has already been a shift from IP-based blocking to temporary-account blocking[1]. I hope this will help, though I think there is still more we can do to improve the block message UI and overall user experience.

Thank you again for your feedback! We have a Diff post and additional outreach planned to gather broader community input, but I really appreciate your early and thoughtful response. - KStoller-WMF (talk) 21:09, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

Making file sharing easier

People will upload more to commons and use more if it is as easy as all the other ways people share media. When an iPhone user goes to share a photo via [https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/share-photos-and-videos-iphf28f17237/ios this interface] they should have one of the icons be the wikipedia mobile app with an easy upload interface Czarking0 (talk) 06:03, 29 January 2026 (UTC)