Talk:Reading/Web

Discussions: Desktop Improvements • Accessibility for reading. If you would like to follow our technical work closely, this is what we're doing now.

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You can comment in any language. We are especially interested in:

• Feedback on the functionalities we have already deployed,
• Expanding the list of existing gadgets and user scripts that are related to providing a better desktop experience.

We are discussing with many volunteers and communities at the same time. It may take some time for us to reply here. We apologize for that.

Thank you!

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Page previews

Page Previews feature needs a rethink.

Please disable page previews for logged-out users by default. Showing pop-ups on hover actually breaks "accessibility" for normal people when it is unintended. There are certain natural semantics attached with the use of mouse pointer. Causing pop-ups on hover is like causing a click on the links every time the mouse pointer hovers over them. —2401:4900:1B1B:6E30:494C:49BD:104F:56FB 15:54, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for this comment. I'll inform the team about your idea. Soon, we'll be asking volunteers to share their opinions on the Foundation's annual plan. Announcements will be sent across the wikis and other community communication channels. You're welcome to join that discussion, too! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 15:05, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Bug with Haiti's page preview

I am not sure if this is the place to report bugs, but the page preview for Haiti's wikipedia page seems to display its coordinates instead of the lead section. It may be an issue with the article instead of Page Previews, but I am just guessing.

Some of technical info (if needed)- I am on a laptop (16:9, 1080p); using the latest version of Firefox, although the preview didn't work on Google Chrome and MS Edge as well. I haven't checked if the bug is present on other devices. Bluejet007 (talk) 11:59, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Bluejet007, thanks for writing here. What do you mean by "display its coordinates instead of the lead section"? Could you provide a screenshot perhaps? If you add ?safemode=1 to the URL, does the issue exist, too? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 21:05, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

The issue was with the article not following MOS:ORDER. It has been fixed by another editor and the preview is now functioning. I would consider this issue closed. In case you still want to know how the preview looked before the fix, it was a blank preview without an image and the article text. Only the coordinate values were displayed in simple text formatting.

Also, the preview for a Regional Meteorological Centre in India doesn't display its text (screenshot in my sandbox), but I think it is again an issue with the page rather than with the gadget.

PS If I made any minor mistakes, please bring it up. I am still learning how edit and contribute. Bluejet007 (talk) 04:42, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

@SGrabarczuk (WMF): . See en:User talk:DB1729#Coords. Moving the coords to the bottom per MOS:ORDER is apparently not a valid fix. For an example, go to English WP and hover over the link to Rosario Strait and it displays "There was an issue displaying this preview" instead of giving the preview. It has been suggested to me that I report this behavior as a bug. --DB1729 (talk) 00:29, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

Use AMP as default

I have a question about advanced mobile contributions: are there plans to make AMP the default option for mobile web soon? And if not, would it be possible to make it default on select projects per community consensus? We get more and more questions about missing features in mobile web on dewiki and I keep pointing users at AMP. Many people are not even aware of the option. I believe it would be really useful to have it enabled as default (at least for registered users, but I would also recommend it for unregistered ones). XanonymusX (talk) 08:05, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Please prevent a bug were we get automatically switched to advanced mode when editing or viewing

Any fix to this would be greatly appreciated. I'm tired of having to see the message saying "Please reload the page to enable hotcat", which I never wanted to enable. 2601:206:8580:6F10:25DA:8BB8:2738:3C9C 23:10, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Unification/standardization problem

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T341133

Some sister projects usually do not use coordinates, so the presence of a button Nearby in mobile site (press ☰) is not clear. [1][2] [3] Proeksad (talk) 21:53, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

Thank you @Proeksad for telling us about this problem. I've filed a Phabricator task. Now, we need to wait for decisions who and when would be working on it. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 13:36, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

 Comment: The same feature is in Wikispecies and non-content wikis such as .wikimedia.org (meta., foundation., fi., pt., ru., wikimania., ...) But I don't know enough about all these wikis. Perhaps this is maybe usefull for testing Proeksad (talk) 20:32, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

Great, issue resolved! Proeksad (talk) 20:25, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Talk:Reading/Web/Advanced mobile contributions

Hi. I need help, because the mentioned page is restricted to edit.

In English wikipedia mobile version, the "Advanced mode" keeps enabling automatically after some recent updates, and it gives some annoying features which I do not want currently.

Please stop it, one should enable it themselve if they want. It shouldn't turn on automatically, just like it was few days back. Hope for your kind response please, thank you! M.Billoo2000 (talk) 18:00, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Hello @M.Billoo2000, thanks for coming here to write about those issues. We’ll discuss them, and I’ll let you know what the next steps would be. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 13:24, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

Enable globale settings for Special:MobileOptions

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T233802

Hi @SGrabarczuk (WMF) I've raised this question a couple of months ago and noticed it got archived unanswered [4]:

Is it possible to add an option to Special:GlobalPreferences and/or Special:MobileOptions to enable advanced mode globally?

As a global sysop I'm fighting crosswiki spam/vandalism across many wikis using both mobile and desktop devices. It's very annoying that I need to enable the advance mode for every project individually instead of having the option to enable it globally. Thanks! Johannnes89 (talk) 16:03, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

Hello @Johannnes89! I'm happy to give you the answer. The rationale for this change has been known, and personally, I do see clearly who would benefit and why. You may take a look at the Phabricator task to see discussions we've had about it.

Unfortunately, it's not in our plans to add this option. This year, our team is focusing on building something like preferences for logged-out users, dark mode, and readability.

I wholeheartedly encourage you to put this idea into Community Wishlist Survey/Sandbox, though. If this idea is submitted and supported by more people (it doesn't need to be at the top of the charts) we will be more likely to do this. Granting Community Wishlist Survey wishes is becoming a shared effort across the technical teams of the Foundation. So, 🤞! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 18:38, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll keep this in mind for next years Community Wishlist Survey! :) Johannnes89 (talk) 18:43, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

Adding "simple english"option before beginning of an article

The true power of Wikipedia, I think, in its delivery of knowledge. Simple English Wikipedia will open more Avenue for people to learn things with plain language and it also allow the simple English Wikipedia to expand in usage and development. The "open in simple English Wikipedia "link can be placed at the top so that people can choose to read in plain language. When more attention is given to this very underrated project, I suppose many more people will take part in creating more articles. Also, simple English Wikipedia allows access of knowledge to people with learning difficulties and intellectual disability. Kaveinthran (talk) 08:17, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

Hi and thanks for this idea, @Kaveinthran. If I understand correctly, this is a proposal for a new project. Although it seems to be a small and therefore easy task, I doubt if we could spend any time on it, unfortunately. This is because we work on projects where all the wikis may benefit, like Desktop Improvements or Accessibility for reading. I guess that in the meantime, English Wikipedians might write a gadget addressing this.

It is possible that at some point, we'll make a similar change on all the wikis. We were thinking on allowing a one-click access to one or two language versions, but it will most likely depend on the user preferences and behavior (like recently read wikis), not on the hard wiki-wide settings, so the impact on Simple English Wikipedia would be smaller than the one you're hoping for.

Thanks, SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 13:06, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

Issue with State-sponsored terrorism Wikipedia page

The page preview for the Wikipedia page State-sponsored terrorism shows some sort of gory surgery picture as the page preview. Looking through the page, I don't see the image in question and as such I don't know why the image shows up in the page preview. Can anyone explain why this is, or otherwise fix it? Thanks! --Paulie 27 (talk) 14:29, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Hey @Paulie 27, thanks for letting me know. It was because of a vandalism on a template used in that page. Now it should be gone, and if the image is visible, this is because of cache. It will be gone soon anyway. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 16:23, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Page preview for Mosque article showing unrelated country flag

Hi, an editor noticed that the page previews for Mosque and Waqf (and perhaps others we haven't noticed) are currently showing an Israeli country flag, which has no relation to the articles in question (example screenshot here; see talk page discussion here). As far as we can see, the flag isn't used in the articles or in their Wikidata items, etc, so I'm wondering if anyone here has an idea of where this is coming from? (We haven't tried overriding it by adding lead images to the articles, I figured it would be good to know what's causing this first.) Thanks for any help, R Prazeres (talk) 22:19, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Update: I believe the cause has been identified at the talk page and this has been resolved ([5]). Thanks. R Prazeres (talk) 06:41, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Page Previews show cached vandalised pages

I recently came across a link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Entente on wikipedia, which instead of correctly displaying a preview to the page, simply read "Is fortnite addiction real?". This line was part of vandalism on the Triple Entente page, which had since been reverted, but apparently the vandalised version remained cached, which lead to it being the version displayed as a preview. After I forced a cache purge of the page this issue appears to be solved, but may appear after other cases of vandalism, on other articles as well. I suggest automatically purging the cache of a page after reverting changes on that page. Abakesh (talk) 15:57, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

Vector 2022 vote in Russian Wikipedia

Dear @OVasileva (WMF), @NBaca-WMF, @Jon (WMF), @JScherer-WMF and @SGrabarczuk (WMF), you announced your plans to deploy Vector 2022 by default in Russian Wikipedia by 13th of February. There was a lot of discontent about this allegedly premature deployment, so I organized a vote on the question whether the community supports it at the current moment. Only 6% of the community members think that Vector 2022 is ready to be used by default, while 94% of users prefer the deployment to be postponed until the diverse problems with Vector 2022 are solved. Please take this into consideration and answer about it here or in the original topic. Wikisaurus (talk) 15:26, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

I would add a bit to let you understand our community members' point of view.

From our perspective, an effective way of implementing such major changes would require several iterations, starting from effective and wide top-down information campaign regarding your plans; gathering the feedback; reporting on the measures taken and proceeding to the next iteration until everyone is ready. What happened instead.

1. You tried to collect some feedback of the user experience with the Vector 2022 by creating a topic inside our forum. It was a good step but you failed to reach the wide audience; the vast majority of the community simply missed it. As a result, lots of people still experience problems with Vector 2022 and have bugs to report but have no idea what to do with them, how to report them. What could be done better is to send an email to everyone or put a banner on the main page in order to really reach as many members as possible. It's not an overkill in case when you plan to change the whole UI.
2. When a message with feedback request was posted, you didn't provide the context of this. It wasn't mentioned that this topic was the last chance to post a bug and that the next step will be the immediate switching to the Vector 2022 by default. It didn't sound very important, it looked more like some routine topic; so many if not most readers ignored it. You could have warned everyone about the big picture.
3. The feedback wasn't processed properly. There were some issues described by the community members, but they we were left in the discussions and never made it to the Phabricator. I spent time to scroll through everything and re-post some of them to the Phabricator by myself but what if I didn't? You could either process it carefully by yourself or post a detailed instruction on how our community members can post bugs to Phabricator by themselves, or both.
4. As I checked, almost half of the Russian audience has a screen resolution of 1280x1024 or less which is fine for the old UI but absolutely not enough for the Vector 2022. There is a dozen of serious issues in the user experience with Vector 2022 with such a resolution. Some elements overlap, some elements become confusing after scrolling; there are double vertical scroll bars; UX on the tablets became worse etc. You should not switch to Vector 2022 before these issues are solved.
5. There are thousands of Russian articles with wide tables and wide images, panoramas and other wide objects that looked fine in the old UI but the layout will break the UX in Vector 2022. What you could do is provide tools to identify these pages, provide us with the guideline on how to adapt them beforehand, give us time to inform the article watchers and implement these changes, then collect feedback and THEN proceed with the switching.
6. The last post of your team with the final switch date on short notice caught people (especially active editors) unprepared. They still have issues with Vector 2022 and see no interest from your side to fix it. They feel that you don't care about them as there was no mention from your side that they can influence your decision. There is tension and mistrust growing. Another reason why it happens is that there already were precedents of actions taken by the WMF without reaching consensus with the community. The common voice is now "WMF ignored us before, now they ignore us again". Members feel powerless and rightless, and frustrated. What you could do is demonstrate that their voice is heard and that it's important; instruct them on how to reach you and demonstrate that you are willing and able to take action, that you will react on that voice.

Nikolay Komarov (talk) 08:55, 12 February 2024 (UTC)

Yes, thanks for this detailed report, I support it. Examples of incorrect operation can be seen at the link & here. Lesless (talk) 13:46, 12 February 2024 (UTC)